


Back in the Saddle

by Guede



Series: Commonwealth [2]
Category: Aerosmith - Fandom, Rock Music RPF, Steven Tyler (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crack Treated Seriously, Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M, Past Drug Addiction, Rehabilitation, Touring, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 19:57:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4638273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Koi, early morning talk shows, lost keycards, lakeside cabins, and peacock feathers as the path of true devotion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Back in the Saddle

_TYLER: That album was really more about the lead-up than anything else. We already had all the pieces together and we knew if we just got all our ducks in a row, got them set right, we were going to blow everybody away. But first we had to figure out how to set it up. That’s where we started arguing._  
_HAMILTON: We were just getting off a tour, and while it’d gone well, everyone was a little ragged. You’re always worn out by the end, and it was also the first tour we’d done completely sober. It was a little weird anyway._  
_PERRY: Everybody just needed to shut up and sit down, if you ask me._  
_TYLER: Well, fine, but the thing is, we’re really bad at that._

“Steven.”

“Stop talking,” Joe mumbled, burrowing deeper into the bed. His elbow caught Steven in the gut and he let out an irritated grunt at Steven’s gasp. Then he sighed and flopped his arm straight, half-heartedly rubbing at the chunk of stomach he’d just excavated and also, most likely not coincidentally, keeping Steven from getting any closer to sitting up. “Look, we can just fuck again, okay?”

The door bowed inwards under a mighty blow. Five-inch stiletto, from the sound of it. “Steven! Steven, goddamn it!”

“Oh.” Joe hitched his shoulders back, then dropped them and locked his chin over Steven’s shoulder. “Make _them_ stop that.”

“I can’t do that from the fucking bed, Joe,” Steven said, wriggling at his arm. He hit the other man on the back, then pushed at Joe’s head. Then he flopped backward and wondered if it was really worth the effort, getting up and then dealing with whatever it was plus Joe’s bad mood plus the fact that yeah, Steven still felt like somebody had run him over with their trailer. “Oh, fuck this.”

Joe made an exasperated noise, like Steven had kept him hanging for hours instead of, oh, just taking a couple seconds to consider the potential repercussions of ignoring somebody beating on their door, and Steven was on the verge of getting up anyway just to piss off the son of a bitch when Joe slid over and licked the side of Steven’s jaw. Just licked it, like that was how you greeted the day, and hell, it probably was how you should do it. One long hot swipe, flicking off Steven’s chin so the moving air brushed over his mouth, and Steven was still breathing in from that when Joe put something more substantial than air on his mouth and okay, thank you, nice to have some appreciation for sound decision-making skills.

“Steven! I will make them take off this thing off its fucking hinges if you don’t get your ass out here right _now_! That ass is supposed to be getting interviewed in a half an hour!”

Maybe—no, she’d do it. Steven dropped out of the kiss and blew a raspberry at the wall, reluctantly letting his hands unweave from Joe’s hair. “Oh, fuck _this_.”

“She doesn’t fucking own your ass,” Joe agreed, rolling over.

“I don’t care what the hell Perry is telling you either!” Laura shouted. “He might fuck that guitar real damn good, but I’m the one booking his fucking ass too!”

Steven couldn’t help himself and sniggered as he dragged himself over to the edge of the bed. He felt Joe’s backhand skimming over his head, rammed his forearm into the man’s ribs, and then more or less fell off the bed. “Fuck!”

They were in the trailer, not some hotel room. Something bashed his right knee, another thing set every nerve in his left hand to singing mercy, and then his head bounced a couple times on the floor. He twisted over, forgetting again how narrow the space was, and banged his right foot for good measure. Swearing, Steven just pulled in all his limbs and let gravity drop him into a safe position.

“Wait a fucking minute,” Joe was saying. “We’re fucking _coming_.”

Nothing was smacking Steven now, so he risked unwinding one arm and looked up at Joe, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking right back down at him. Rubbing one eye with his hand, scabbed knuckles from last night’s amp mishap, the uncovered eye next to it not that much prettier, what with the red lines and dark bags and weary, weary amusement.

“I don’t get it,” Joe said. “Steven, you fall off when you’re already down.”

Steven gave him the finger and Joe laughed right back, the asshole. He rocked off the bed into a hunch, grabbing at Steven’s arm, then grabbing Steven’s waist when Steven jerked his arm away. Then he straightened up, dragging Steven with him, and Steven had to give up on hitting him to keep from getting slammed into the wall. Steven got one hand back to brace himself and then ended up smashing it as Joe moved in tight, unusually interested in the side of Steven’s head.

“Still in one piece, Perry,” Steven muttered. He didn’t have any room for his other arm, so he slung that over Joe’s shoulder and then used the leverage to peer around for the clock. They probably were late, but on occasion Laura had been enough of an enterprising, sadistic bitch to call a false alarm just to get them out there in what she considered a timely manner. “Nothing’s getting canceled, nobody needs to freak out, the show can fucking go on.”

“Yeah?” Joe was still running his fingers around behind Steven’s ear. “What’s the capital of New Hampshire?”

So Steven yanked back his head, because seriously, what the fuck, and there Joe was, grinning like a maniac. For a second Steven still was mad at him, and then…and then he sighed, leaning against the wall, anger slipping away like sand through the fingers, and Joe’s smile got leaner, showing less teeth, but that was just cutting out all the flash so you could get straight to the real heat at the center. And that was what Steven got in the morning sometimes, Joe Perry looking at him like they were going to fucking rule the world and have a damn good time doing it, and that was what nobody else got at any time of the day.

Laura yelled again, but Joe pulled in for a quick mouth and hands, stroking lips and hips, full press up against Steven, who closed his eyes and just took it. Waste not, want not, and if Steven couldn’t quite live up to the second part of that, despite the best efforts of all his therapists, he certainly would abide by the first part.

“So how’s the royal couple?” Laura said when Steven finally cracked open the door. She had a cup of coffee with her, but the angle of it and her arm were all wrong to explain why she’d started out looking nowhere near eye-level. “Hickeys on the inseam. Well, I guess that rules out your cowboy chaps.”

“Don’t you ever get tired?” Joe muttered, passing behind Steven. He’d dragged on some jeans for now, but had an armful of leather and stepped in the bathroom just as Laura came in.

“No, and believe me, with what you two put me through, I’m as amazed by that as you are,” Laura retorted. She shut the door and leaned on it as Steven finished tying one of Joe’s shirts around his waist. “Not kicking and clawing for the shower?”

Steven shrugged, realized Laura was right about the hickeys, and began ambling slowly back towards the bedroom. “It’s a three on the asshole meter today. No point in inviting rain when the forecast is sunny with clear skies, is there? And anyway, still feel like somebody tossed me under the trailer.”

“So there’s been an improvement?” Laura cocked a brow, then rolled her eyes and handed Steven the cup of coffee. “I mean, yesterday you were saying it was like somebody had tossed you under the whole trailer train.”

“Yeah, well, I came back here and calmed down and talked it over with Joe, and after some serious thought, they’re still fucking assholes.” The coffee was shockingly good. So good, in fact, that Steven had to pry off the lid and check that it really was coffee and not just some bizarre hypnotic mind-trick of Laura’s. Which he wouldn’t put past her either, but he supposed that her having a secret stash of gourmet coffee for when they were stuck out beyond even a fucking Starbucks was more plausible. “But, and let me tell you, I am digging deep into my well of compassion here, I shouldn’t hold the fact that they’re fucking assholes against the point they’re making, and maybe they’ve got one.”

The bed was a mess. Sheets off in a wad in the corner, mattress wrenched sideways and hanging over one side of the frame like a drunk dangling over the toilet, vast damp patches of dubious origin. After a futile look round for alternatives, Laura set her shoulders like the good jaded trouper she was and picked up another of Joe’s shirts from the floor. She tossed it over one of the drier stretches of the bed and then sat on it, legs akimbo. “Sounds good so far.”

Steven opened his mouth.

“I mean, sounds like something we can work with, as opposed to something you’re going to spend hours screaming about and then sound like you deep-throated a blowtorch at the next show,” Laura amended. She raised her hand to push some hair out of her face, got distracted with a yawn, and then let her hand flop back into her lap, looking up at Steven with deceptively sleepy eyes. “So you and Joe talked about it.”

“Yeah,” Steven said slowly, turning around. He heard the mattress creaking as Laura shifted her weight around, staring at his ass, and well, she had ponied up fucking ambrosial coffee, even if that was probably a bribe for later. He gave her a shake, grinned at her giggling wolf-whistle, and then opened up the closet to start about the business of figuring out what to wear to this shindig.

“And?” Laura said.

Steven pushed some hangers back and forth. Chaps, sadly, were definitely out. As much as he knew and appreciated and, frankly, adored the fact that half of making it was looking it, he wasn’t going to get five feet out the door in those and literally getting his ass dragged around wasn’t looking it either. Anyway Joe probably had the leather end covered, so he should go with something that offered a little contrast, or else they’d get called a bunch of derivative biker punks again.

“That how you got the hickeys?” Laura drawled.

“Honey, I thought you liked it when Joe got all hot and bothered around me,” Steven muttered. He poked at his shirts some more. One of them lost something that zipped down the silk and then vanished into the tangle of scarves and boots and other various decorative elements smothering the bottom of the closet.

“Yeah, I do. Not so much when he’s being shitty.” Laura prodded the back of Steven’s leg with her foot. “Advance intel says the couch is blue and the walls are beige. I say go with the pink one.”

For a moment Steven considered bending over and at least figuring out what the hell that dropped thing was. Then he sighed and turned around, hooking one hand over the bar for balance. Wardrobe could just figure it out. “But I know it just means he _loves_ me, honey.”

“Oh, my God.” Rolling her eyes, Laura nearly forgot herself and put her hands behind herself. She jerked her arms up just in time, then made faces at the stained bed while Steven snickered to cover the way his back down to his ass was bitching him out for that dramatic swivel. “You two are the definition of functional dysfunction, Steven, but there ain’t nobody here who’s a victim. Just assholes who really need to fight their own fucking fights.”

“Well, that was the fucking problem, wasn’t it?” Steven said, turning back to the closet. “It wasn’t even about the goddamn magazine cover anymore. It was—I don’t know what the fuck it was at that point, but we all know that much. Joe might’ve been taking it out there, but considering neither of us honestly knew where the fuck that was, I think he was just trying to keep our heads out of the water. Anyway, he calmed down afterwards, and if you want to talk about fighting your own fights, why the hell am I the one always talking him down? I’m not the one who gets him up there in the first place.”

Laura kicked him again. “Steven. You’re fucking him.”

“Fine, but if I’m his therapist that means, well, that I’m not his therapist anymore, because conflict of interest and all that.” Another twinge ran up Steven’s spine and he grimaced, twisting up on his left heel to try and get the muscles to unwind. “Look, you were there. Tom fucking pulled that England shit again.”

“Yeah, and I agree, he was out of line, but where it breaks down for me is how you get from there to Joe and Tom screaming at each other over _your_ ADD,” Laura said. She got off the bed and began moving around behind Steven, talking under her breath about pig-sties and Third World health codes. “I’m sorry if it’s getting old being the only one Joe occasionally listens to, but well, you fucking are that. And you can scream plenty for yourself, so if you just told him that once in a while—”

“Oh, wait a minute. Wait a fucking minute.” Steven turned too fast and wrenched something in his thigh muscles. He hissed, cutting himself off, but Laura was at least willing to hear his side, even if she was just as willing to stick knives in his back first. “Wait. So this is somehow my fault now? Laura, _I_ was there, and believe me, I wasn’t having any more fun than anyone else. I mean, did you see me with fucking popcorn at the side or something?”

Laura pressed her lips together, then shook her head. She pushed her hands back into her hair, pulling it tight away from her face, then dropped back onto the bed. “No. No, that’s not what I meant.”

“Well, it’s what you just fucking said,” Steven snapped. He leaned against the side of the closet and rubbed at his face till he realized his hand was trembling. He took it down, then put it back against his mouth to make himself breathe through his nose. One of those things from therapy, you breathe through your nose because you couldn’t do it so fast as through your mouth, trying to make yourself calm down before you lost your fucking rag all over somebody you _thought_ was on your side.

“I—okay, yeah, it’s what I said,” Laura finally muttered. She looked up at him, winced, then changed her mind about touching Steven just in time to save her hand. “I’m sorry. I am. I’m—Steven, I’m sorry. That’s not really the problem.”

Breathing through the nose wasn’t really doing much for the raging bitterness inside Steven, but it did keep him too busy to say anything. He could remember all the good things Laura had done and did do, and was going to do, and he could also remember how fucking hard it was to find somebody that good. But it was a damn fucking lucky thing for her that he was sober, because plain fucking remembering didn’t really give him the reason for holding back. Being able to think about why he was remembering all of that did.

“But it’s close, you know.” Laura ran her hand back over her head again, gathering all her hair into a tail over one shoulder. She propped her arm up on her knee and leaned her head against it, staring at the floor. “Because I swear to God, that’s what they’re thinking is going on.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about that?” Steven said after a moment, dropping his hand to cup the back of his neck. That ache in his back was starting to pool there, right at the base of his skull, like a throbbing knot of pain. “That’s been around since Joe walked in the door, and I’ve tried—you have no _idea_ what I’ve tried, and it’s still there. And honestly, I don’t know what the fuck that’s about anyway. I fucking asked Tom once, you know. I asked him, at least _tell_ me which one of us you’re desperately in love with.”

The side of Laura’s mouth twitched. Then she pulled her arm off her knee and sat up, popping her back, giving Steven one of those wry, wondering why this came attached to the free porn, smiles. “And how did that go?”

“He laughed it off, and then later that was the show where I sprained my knee sliding down the stage and he got fucking mad about me ‘clowning around,’” Steven said. He massaged the back of his neck, then moved his hand to grab at his shoulder and let his head fall back against the side of the closet. “Look, don’t quote therapist three at me. I know it’s not really that. But I don’t know what it is, and…you know, I don’t think Joe really does either. And believe me, getting him to talk about that’s an exercise in masochism that nobody ever gives me credit for.”

“I give you credit,” Laura said, and then let out a grudging sigh at Steven’s arched brow. “All right, yes, I do get on your ass about him, but I acknowledge that you two fight just as much in here as you do out there with the rest of us. Happy?”

Steven pretended to think about it, while Laura pretended that they weren’t both wincing at the way that joke had twisted out from under them. Then Steven looked back into the closet.

“Yeah, actually,” he said quietly. “You know, when I’m not thinking about all the asshole things—”

“What asshole?” Joe came padding down the hall in his full rock god splendor. Which was, even if that snarl pulling at his lips was setting off the warning sirens and red flags and various other emergency alerts off in Steven’s head, pretty fucking splendiferous with leather wrapped so tight around his legs that it was moving with the muscle, and the nice tanned chest showing up the silver zippers on the coat, also black leather, and water dripping down that chest from the wet tail of hair twisted over one shoulder.

He stopped a little short, because he knew Steven was looking and he fucking liked that, even if his stone-faced act wasn’t going to admit to it, and then slid into the room, snarl a little closer to leaping at somebody’s throat when he saw Laura was still there. She smiled at him, doing her own once-over, and Steven just had to drape an arm around Joe’s neck and enjoy a close-up of him remembering once again why glowering didn’t work on her.

“You get his ass decent and in the car in fifteen minutes, and I’ll hand over the list of usual suspects,” Laura said, getting to her feet. She squeezed past Joe, patting him on the shoulder, and then saw herself out.

“She is so fucking weird,” Joe muttered, glancing after her. Then he looked at Steven, not snarling now but still plenty annoyed, and then down at Steven. “And why aren’t you dressed?”

Steven pulled his arm further around Joe’s neck, wrapping his wrist around in Joe’s wet hair so water dribbled down between his fingers. “Don’t know what to wear.”

Joe looked at him again, then at the closet. Then at him. “Isn’t she supposed to help with that?”

“Laura thinks the pink one’s gonna go with the set of whoever we’re talking to, but I didn’t want to tell her we fucked that one to hell and maple syrup last week,” Steven said. He nuzzled at the side of Joe’s face, then bucked into the man’s hip when Joe slipped his hand up between Steven’s legs. “Canada was really fun, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Joe said after a moment. His head went down, leaving Steven pushing his nose into Joe’s ear, and then craned sideways so he could laugh into the side of Steven’s neck. “Yeah, okay, then why don’t you wear the green one?”

“Because I like the green one.” Steven jerked his hips again, then had to bite down on Joe’s collar as the son of a bitch fingered one of those bruises that was keeping him from his chaps. Well, Joe ruined enough of his clothes anyway. “I want to wear that one again.”

Joe stopped groping him. “Okay, fine, I like it too.”

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” Steven said, and then hissed, dragging at Joe. Hard enough to send them stumbling into the wall, Joe-first since he had the leather padding. “Oh, fuck, no, I’m supposed to be dressed, remember?”

“Nope,” Joe said, and made Steven forget too.

* * *

Steven went with the green ruffled shirt, a dress jacket, and black leggings because he didn’t have any pants that were looser than skin-hugging, so he just went with the pair with the softest fabric. Which was kind of a mistake, since that felt like someone constantly stroking the tender bits even when he was just sitting still, and he wasn’t doing that for more than about two seconds because their host for the morning had a habit of dropping her voice at the end of her questions so he had to keep leaning over to catch them. And dropping her eyes, and she was blonde and busty and surprisingly good at keeping up a megawatt smile in light of Joe’s increasingly sarcastic answers.

“That wasn’t in the preview,” Joe muttered to Laura as soon as they were off the couch. 

“What, the push-up bra?” Laura didn’t even look up from her texting. “Relax, Perry, I bribed the cameraman to shoot from the waist up. For all the viewers know, she’s just admiring Steven’s boots.”

Steven tucked his arm through Joe’s and then swayed his weight into the other man for good measure, knocking them off the edge of the platform. Then, while Joe was still working on his balance, Steven hip-checked them another four or five feet towards the door. “Besides, you know you’re still the only man for me.”

Joe snorted, but he stopped looking like he was contemplating how many morning-show hosts he could fit in their car trunk. He took his arm away from Steven so he could get out a cigarette, then let Steven have it back while they walked down the hall. “So everyone’s that mad at me?”

“What?” Steven said, checking his phone. Apparently, Joey was talking to him again, even if it was just to ask Steven whether they were changing up the set-list again. He texted Joey back, then looked up. “What makes you think anybody’s mad at you?”

Laura had hung back for some last-minute arm-twisting with the producers, and the security guy had gone ahead to make sure that the car was ready, so for the moment they were relatively private. Damn it.

“No idea,” Joe drawled. He smiled at Steven, not one of his nice ones, and then cut that out like he’d wrapped one of his strings around it and then yanked till the head came off. “Don’t be a fucking idiot. You and Laura—”

“Me and Laura talked about whether or not we’re in a love triangle with fucking Tom, like you’d know if you talked to her once in a while,” Steven snapped. He dropped Joe’s arm, shoving his phone back into his pocket, and then almost didn’t feel how bad that was for his aches and pain, he was so fucking frustrated and fed up and done with it all. “Jesus Christ, sometimes I think we should fuck just so you’d actually have something to yell at me about.”

Joe blinked hard. He could be such a bastard, nothing but iron spikes all over, and then he’d look at Steven like that, like he actually had a soft spot in there amongst the thorns and Steven had just stabbed right through it and laid him out flat. “What?”

Steven started to tell him, then just shifted to a long exhale. He rubbed at his hip, then pinched up the fabric there and tugged it across his leg, trying to get some slack over one of the more bruised places. “What’d you think we were talking about?”

“The interview?” Joe said, still like he was down there on the ground. He blinked again, then looked at the cigarette ashing away on his hand. After a second, he put that out on the wall and tossed the butt at a nearby trashcan. Then he got out his pack and began shaking out a new one. “I—because we were late, you know? We were late for the last three, and she gets—but you talked about what?”

“The thing,” Steven said. He looked at the man he was willingly letting drive him right back up to crazytown, without even South American pharmaceuticals for an excuse, and then he slouched back against the wall and pressed his hands over his eyes. “The thing last night, you know, where fucking _Rolling Stone_ finally calls us up and gives us a fucking _cover_ , only it’s me and you only, and then it all went to shit in Granny’s handbasket and Joe, honestly, like I’m going to bother talking to Laura about being late to Small Town, Iowa’s third-best local morning show. I mean, am I or am I not the fucking guy you’ve been boning all over this country?”

Joe fiddled with his pack some more, finally pulling out a cigarette, using that hair of his to stall again. “I don’t know.” He looked up enough to show that, of all times, he’d decided to pull out his sense of humor now. Then he ducked back down, shoving his pack away. “No, obviously, you are, Steven, and if you call your therapist over this I’m hitchhiking to the next show. You’re supposed to save those for actual emergencies, not just for your ego shrinking a little.”

“That’s it, baby, keep on talking to me so sweet,” Steven said acidly. 

“Steven,” Joe started, jerking his head up. He left it there for a couple seconds, then shrugged and stared down at the cigarette twisting between his fingers. “Look, I didn’t know we were still on that other thing. I thought it got decided.”

Sometimes Steven wondered whether it was just part of the act, putting on like everything stopped at the door, and then sometimes he honestly thought Joe was—was missing something in his head, like color-blindness only instead of missing red and green, he was missing people having fucking feelings. Everybody might call Steven a selfish bastard and yeah, there was some truth in that, but at least he noticed when people were holding a goddamn grudge. “Joe. I told everyone I was not having this tour fall apart over a fucking magazine, and then you said you weren’t doing it alone, so you guessed we just weren’t doing it.”

“And that’s not deciding it?”

“No, that’s deciding it, but that sure as fuck didn’t make people stop being mad,” Steven sighed. He ended up watching the cigarette too, watching the way the white filter was starting to bend and smudge under the pressure. “Or didn’t you notice that none of the other guys came over before we came over here?”

“Yeah, I noticed, but I’m not sure that I care,” Joe muttered. He kicked at the ground, then stuffed the cigarette into his mouth and snapped his lighter at it like he maybe meant to take off his whole lip with the lid. After one drag, he pulled it out and stared off to the side. “It was a stupid fucking argument anyway. They asked for us, we didn’t ask them to ask for that. But everybody just jumped to conclusions and thought that.”

“And they’re assholes for that,” Steven agreed. “But then you went and said maybe we should all think about why they’re asking for just me and you anyway. I’m still in therapy, all right, so maybe I’m not the most level-headed person around, but I don’t think that came out too great.”

Joe looked over, then rolled his eyes. He took another drag off his cigarette, sucking it viciously till the ash had hit the halfway point, and then spit curls of smoke at the wall by Steven’s head. “Okay, maybe not. But do we always have to go back to me leaving with Elyssa?”

“I don’t know,” Steven said, and then snorted at Joe’s expression. He was allowed some fucking humor too. “You and Tom never fucking talk about it, so—”

“Because there’s nothing to talk about. Because we already _talked_ , and anyway, that’s just…back then,” Joe muttered, waving his hand. “Jesus. Does _he_ know who I’m fucking all over the place?”

Steven snorted again, then pushed himself up the wall a little. He shifted how his weight fell on his hips, then shifted it back when that didn’t do anything for his sore muscles.

“I really don’t know why we’re the only fucking two with shrinks around here,” Joe added.

“You still talk to yours? Could’ve sworn she was calling me up a couple nights ago, begging me to help get you back. Poor girl, I think you ruined her for life,” Steven said. He grinned when Joe stuttered a breath, caught out, and then flat-out laughed at the other man’s annoyed expression. “Oh, come on, honey, we all know the talking cure’s my special thing.”

Joe kept glaring at him, but it wasn’t even close to half-hearted. He hitched one shoulder, like he didn’t give a shit, and lifted his cigarette towards his mouth for another cool movie-star smoke. And then he looked all outraged when Steven swiped it, when the thing was down to the filter anyway. Steven didn’t get more than a ghost kiss with nicotine before he had to stub it out and toss it.

“So what, we have to talk about it some more?” Joe finally said, looking like somebody was hauling him along by his guitar.

“Well, we do have a show tonight. Kind of hard to do that without Tom. Or Joey, and I really don’t get what was that with you two,” Steven said. “I thought you and he were fine.”

Joe shrugged and stuck his hand back in his pocket. Not going for his cigarettes like Steven thought at first, just crooking his arm and standing there, acting like it was just a pose and not an offer. He closed his arm right up once Steven stuck his hand through it, then hooked his thumb out of his pocket and into Steven’s waistband. “We are, far as I know. I’m in the same band as him. The hell else does he want? You’re the one he talks to.”

“I don’t know,” Steven mumbled, shoving his face into Joe’s shoulder. “Why the hell does everybody think I do? Because I don’t. I really don’t. I’m just the fucking mouth, okay? Got no ears.”

“Okay, Steven,” Joe said. Amusement running under his voice like a good rumbling bass line, just making everything move together. He leaned his head against the top of Steven’s for a second, then lifted it and Steven felt his chin scraping by Steven’s ear. “Laura’s coming. So’s the producer what’s his name.”

Steven was lifting his head when he heard the edge coming into Joe’s voice. He hesitated, then laid his head down again. Laura might be a little pissy now, but he knew she’d get it later if he explained. If he felt like explaining, with the way the day was going, and anyway, he didn’t really care about that so much as not having to talk Joe out of yet another fight. “Whatever, we were good for the interview. It’s supposed to be never confirm anything anyway, not act like our hands’ll fall off if we touch each other.”

“Good to know,” Joe said. Tone still tight, but his shoulder was relaxing under Steven. He moved his thumb back and forth along Steven’s waistband, then maybe started to say something. Except he gave up before it was even a syllable, just blowing out the rest of his breath, letting Steven lean on him. 

If it’d been that important, Steven figured, Joe would’ve said it no matter who was coming up to them. So he let it go. It was just a couple of seconds more till Laura got to them and started talking, so he didn’t want to get into anything petty either.

* * *

_WHITFORD: It was getting to the point where you don’t even remember why you’re mad. But you know you are, and you know the other guy’s not going to give in and everyone’s got their pride, of course. It’s hard to move around in that kind of situation and I have to give Steven credit for doing it anyway. I certainly was doing my best to just stay clear._  
_KRAMER: Sometimes I wanted to kill Brad for not sticking around and suffering with the rest of us, and sometimes I wanted to kill Steven just for annoying the ever-living fuck out of everyone, even if he meant well._  
_TYLER: Everyone gets mad at me anyway, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference whatever I did. Besides, if it’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people not talking. Fine, be an asshole, but at least own up and say you are._  


When they got back it was still way too early to even go see how the roadies were doing. Joe wanted to go back to sleep, but once Steven was up, he generally was up for the rest of the day, regardless of the amount of drugs in his system.

He found Joey kicking back with Ray on the tailgate of somebody’s pick-up truck, surfing sports videos on Joey’s laptop. “TV in the trailer kicked out,” Ray explained, twisting the laptop around. He grimaced and picked up the laptop and put it on top of a toolbox. “And Jesus, the wireless is shit out here. I feel like I’m back in the Stone Age.”

After a lot of badgering from Steven, Ray had come out to the third show or so on the tour, just to show the local scalpers how business was done according to him, and had gotten so pissed off at how incompetent the road crew was that he’d stayed around to show them all how that was done. He had a pretty good nose for when Joe was about to get off his ass and jump into it, so he generally managed to just show up for the morning-after part, when they were all too tired to bother getting annoyed at what was left of his tough-guy attitude. He gave Steven a hand up onto the truck, gave Steven’s ass a knowing smack that basically took out Steven’s knees, and then laughed off Steven’s retaliatory punch to the shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m about ready for civilization again too,” Joey said. He was still giving Steven some wary looks, but he stuck out his arm so Steven could steady his stinging ass on the spare tires they were using as seats. “So how’d the interview go?”

Steven rocked his head back and forth, gripping his tire with both hands. The lack of cushion under his buttocks was throwing off his balance, but he had to admit it was a hell of a lot easier on the sore spots. “The usual. We talked up the concert, they brought up that shit from Las Vegas, it got handled, host was hot and stacked and Joe got snippy with her. I think we convinced them all that we’re clean-cut, family-lovin’ folk from good homes.”

Ray cracked up, so Steven had to fend off another one of the man’s fucking windmill slaps, but Joey just grinned a little. He rolled his eyes when Steven, trying to get out of Ray’s reach, scooted round and leaned on his shoulder. “Hey, man, if you’re still fighting with Joe, don’t drag me into it. Go find some blonde to mack on.”

“And what’s this, raven tresses?” Steven said, blowing at Joey’s hair. Then he slid off Joey and tucked up one leg underneath himself, trying not to fall into the center of the tire. He could see Ray glancing at the still-to-be-unpacked crates, wondering if now was a good time to run—downside of online TV, not as many convenient commercial breaks—and deliberately raised his voice. Fine, dodge bullets with Brad, but don’t fucking act like that wasn’t what you were doing. “We’re not fighting. He was just, you know, him.”

“Yeah, we know all about that,” Joey muttered, and the way that curled out of his mouth was surprisingly bitter. Tom could do a good line in that, because the man might have that soft precise college-professor voice but he had a memory like a fucking elephant and could use it to stomp like one too, but usually Joey was too busy looking for the fun side to bother with all that points-watching. “Where’s he, anyway?”

Steven pretended to peer around them like one of those old-timey explorers. Then he hit Joey on the back. “Not here, and you keep bringing him up, I’m going to think we’re not friends anymore. What, I’m not good enough for you now?”

That made Joey laugh, even if it was still pretty raw. He rubbed at his twitchy eye, then bumped his shoulder back into Steven. “Oh, fuck him.”

“Yep, got that covered,” Steven said, hooking his arm over Joey’s shoulders.

Joey rolled his eyes, then glanced up as Ray got off the truck bed, saying something about grabbing some more water. He asked Ray to get them a couple too, then reached out and switched the laptop to some gross-out comedy show, slapping Steven’s hand down when Steven promptly tried to switch it to something else. “Mine, motherfucker. So seriously, though, we done fighting?”

“I’d like to be,” Steven said after a long moment. He rested his chin on Joey’s head, and then, when the other man nodded him off, moved it to the arm he had over Joey’s back. “Wait, you mean…who are we talking about?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. You need Laura to make up a chart or something these days,” Joey muttered. He sat back and stared at the bodily fluids squirting at horrified faces, then looked soberly at Steven. “Hey, so…that thing I said to you last night, about—”

Steven sighed and picked at his ruffles. “Yeah, sorry about that. I mean, I still honestly think she wasn’t right for you, but like therapist one and two say, you gotta learn to separate your prejudices from your concerns.”

“So what, it’s better when you tell me to dump her because you want me to dump her, and not because you want me to stop funking up the backbeat?” Joey snorted. He patted Steven’s knee so they both knew he was just being a jackass, then scowled at the video, which was freezing up from lack of signal. “Didn’t we go over that one in group therapy?”

“I thought that was the girl before that one?” Steven said, trying to remember.

“Well, like it matters. Anyway, you know I really don’t give too much of a shit about it now.” Though the way Joey said that, maybe he hadn’t known that Steven knew till Steven nodded. He stretched out his feet to nudge the laptop around. “So I was thinking about it and it’d be a pretty awesome cover.”

For a moment Steven thought they were going onto cover songs, since a friend of a friend of a music history student had just sent him a shitload of newly-discovered old blues songs they’d ripped to digital and he’d been bugging the guys about it. Then he shifted and he hurt and he remembered what else was hurting them right now. “It’s—”

“You know, she was the one who wanted to know if _we_ were doing it, just because I was sharing rooms with you back then,” Joey said, his disbelief making him stutter a little. “And hey, nothing against you, all right, but that was just so annoying to deal with and I was thinking that that shit might start up again just because people are stupid. So you know, Joe’s enough of a bastard, seems like he can deal with it fine so let him. And it’d be good for—I mean, the cover would be really good for us.”

“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t be the band,” Steven said. He looked at Joey, then clutched his hand to his chest in a mock-display of despair. “Honestly, I work _so_ hard, I go through all these damn sessions, trying to deal with my raging id and then you guys come back and tell me hey, well, maybe it’s cool if you’re just an egotistical asshole after all.”

Joey laughed at him, then finally changed the laptop back to sports. Which weren’t really Steven’s thing either, at least not the constant competition to see who was the biggest fucking pisser, but at least it wasn’t just plain brainless. “Look, Steven, I know we all get shitty sometimes, but basically I just want to play with you. And we got through coked-out you and rehabbed you and laser throat you and still did that, so I don’t think another photo of you getting up in eyeliner and gypsy drag and Joe Perry is going to fuck it up. Not _that_ much.”

“It wouldn’t sound like us if it wasn’t just a little bit fucked,” Steven agreed. He was looking at the laptop for a while before he realized that the stream had frozen again and he was just watching the reloading circle whirl around and around. So he looked over at Joey, who was still watching that, squinting like the whirling was the secret to the universe, and then he looked down at their knees pushing up against each other. Sitting on a bunch of tires in a banged-up truck like they were still digging up the gutters instead of coming towards the end of one of summer’s hottest new-act tours, according to their Twitter and Facebook stats. “You know I love you, right? Joseph Michael Kramer, I loooooove you, and ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no girlfriend low enough, ain’t no Joe Perry bitchy enough…”

“Oh, my God,” Joey said. “Steven, seriously.”

“Okay, so _seriously_.” Steven pulled his arm off Joey but kept on slouching against the other man. “Brad?”

“He walked out halfway through.” Joey’s eye tic went off like it was gunning all engines. “I’m starting to get really fucking annoyed at having to fill him in all the time. He doesn’t want to get into it, fine, but he could just fucking stand in the hall and listen, at least.”

Steven wasn’t too thrilled about Brad’s holier-than-thou attitude either, but it did mean Brad went on the silent protest grandstand way less often than the rest of them and they had a show tonight. One drama queen at a time. “Tom?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t fucking know,” Joey said, sighing. “He’s Tom like Joe’s Joe. Can’t we just make _them_ deal with it?”

“I ask myself that constantly, believe me,” Steven said. “Well, he’s still around, right?”

Joey scratched at the side of his head. “I think Terry took him shopping in town, but yeah, she gave the cook some business over having dinner warm this time so I guess they’re coming back.”

“Shopping?” Steven straightened up and stared around them. Nothing but corn as far as he could see, but Terry was somebody who always knew where she was going, whatever other problems he had with her. “There’s shopping?”

“Not going,” Joey immediately said. “Hell, no, Steven. I will deal with Joe Perry’s massive asshole streak for you, but I am never fucking shopping with you again.”

* * *

One, Joey was thinking of heroin-psycho Steven, who’d been buried for a good eighteen months at this point, and two, they actually had credit cards that didn’t bounce these days, which had significantly changed Steven’s shopping tactics. But Joey was a stubborn bastard about certain alleged traumatic events, so it ended up with Ray driving and Laura in shotgun. Joe had woken up long enough to mumble that he was not fucking wearing any feathers, damn it, and then had snored through Steven’s attempt to kiss him off, so yeah, still a lump back in the bed in the trailer.

“You go through them like peanuts,” Laura said, critically eyeing the blouse Steven was holding up. “On the one hand, they’re cheap enough, but on the other, I don’t know if I want to be enabling Joe to keep making you two late to the after-show meet ‘n greets.”

Steven rolled his eyes, but shoved the blouse back into the rack. He checked on whether Ray was still trying to chat up the bored goth chick minding this thrift shop goldmine—Ray was, and appeared to have struck it rich with comparing knuckle rings—and then went back to feeling up embroidery. “That hasn’t happened in the last month, Kaufman, and you know it. We’re so fucking tired at this point it’s a miracle if I can even remember I’ve got a dick.”

Laura just looked at his ass.

He clenched it, sensing her, and then blew out his breath, mostly annoyed at himself for tripping up and letting himself get that defensive. “Last night and today aside, and that’s just because we got an extra hour because of being rained out. Which mostly got blown on that fucking magazine fight, and by the way, talked to Joey, we’re okay, Brad walked out, he doesn’t give a shit, and now that I’ve done my part, do I get to ask how the fuck that got past you?”

“I was wondering when you were going to bring that up,” Laura said, voice swimming in sarcasm. Then she sighed and slumped down on the box of mismatched men’s shoes she was using as a seat. “Yeah, sorry about that. I don’t know how the hell they got your personal number, but if it helps any, I’ve already reduced three people to a crying breakdown trying to find the mole.”

Steven shuffled shirts for another second, then dropped his hands and turned around. He sat down on the floor, crossing his legs, and felt a little guilty when Laura leaned back, obviously bracing herself. They blew up at each other a lot, but he always thought—hoped—that she got that he didn’t bother coming back to blow up a second time at people he didn’t give a shit about. She’d listened to enough of his therapy recaps. “I don’t really want to talk to Tom.”

“Well, then don’t,” Laura said after a moment. She raised her eyebrows at him, then cursed as her phone went off. After yanking that out, she cursed again when she saw the message. “I’m serious. I know what your psych trifecta says, but sometimes you just can’t talk to people. I talked to Terry and I know nobody’s running off before the tour’s over, and then you’ve all got vacation scheduled anyway.”

“Halle-fucking-lujah,” Steven muttered. 

Laura amen’ed him, then grinned over her phone. “Yes, Steven, I am looking forward to a couple weeks of not pulling out my hair over who’s out with who and who’s getting Joe up in the morning and where your fucking eyeliner’s gone. It’s probably good timing, too. I think a lot of it all is just being done in.”

“Well, can’t stop till you make it.” Steven grabbed his shins and leaned backwards, pulling against his arms, till his head was inside the rack of clothes. He stared up, watching the shirts wave gently above him, like shadows of ripples in a pond, then pulled his head out. “About that. We got a really good roll going—”

“—go on vacation,” Laura said, still texting. She finished that and shoved her phone away and sighed, and then brought down one of her schoolmarm sergeant looks on Steven. “Steven, you know, there’s this great thing called social media, where you can pretend to be multiple places at once while actually being on your couch in your jammies, or, since it’s you and Joe, buck naked, and—”

She ducked the blouse he threw at her and zinged a loafer off his right shoulder. Steven swore and grabbed at his arm, then got up, laughing and shaking his head. “You just want porn to watch while you’re cruising the shore for hot bods.”

“Hell, yes. You two making up with each other and my vibrator have been the only lights in the tunnel more times than you know,” Laura cracked. Grinning again, meaning it, but meaning the shadows touching the edges of her smile too. “It’s two weeks. You’re gonna get to see everybody in the studio right after that and cut a fucking amazing sophomore album, because you’re here to stay and not just here to be the next youtube wonder. So I don’t think anybody’s gonna forget anyone that quick.”

Steven shrugged a shoulder at her, but wasn’t going to disagree. He idly flicked a couple shirts down the rack, then got his eye hooked on a glittery silver flash and pulled out that one. “And in the meantime, I get to post all I want about how O-M-G Joe and me forever haters?” He decided the shirt was worth trying on and tucked it under his arm, listening to Laura’s silence. “He’s getting pissed off at that again.”

“Oh, for…always when I think I’ve got all the fires counted,” Laura muttered. Her heels spiked against the box. “Yeah, well, I stayed the hell out of that one. You guys were the ones who didn’t want to bring it out right away.”

“No, that was the goddamn label,” Steven muttered back. He knew Laura was looking at him—she’d been dying for the dirt on that meeting for ages and he’d been putting her off for ages, and considering she was his friend and publicist and incurable spy, she’d been really good about it—but he just kept looking at blouses. “Whatever, that can wait for vacation. So what about _Rolling Stone_?”

Laura kicked the box again. “Oh, God, I would love to just take one of Joe’s guitars and ram it up their…okay. So look, we’ve got three shows left, they’re sold out, your fan video mash-ups went over the thousand mark last week, and while the _Stone’s_ still, well, the _Stone_ , it’s not making the trends these days so much as rubber-stamping them. Kick it to after the tour, if you want my opinion. I think they’re gonna come back.”

Steven let that roll around in his head for a little bit, and then decided his gut feeling was about the same. He still looked around sometimes, wondering if this was going to be like the last time, getting so far up there and just his fingernails over the edge, just touching it, and then watching his nails rip out as they fell back. But he knew it wasn’t. He really did know that. There were just so many things—not the least that he knew the music was finally right because he finally knew what the music was supposed to be, when he took it outside of his head and to the band, and he hadn’t known that last time. He knew that now and he had to trust in that.

“I like,” Laura said when he turned around, holding up the latest shirt. “Also, so’s Joe, or else I don’t have the biggest blackmail stash of anybody you’re ever going to have to invite to your wedding.”

“Great, it’s a keeper.” Steven stuck that one under his arm and then moved onto the next rack. “Next on the catwalk, ladies and gentleman, coats!”

* * *

One of the guitars cut out when Steven opened the door. The other one dwindled off into some twiddling before Joe took his feet off the coffee table and zeroed in on the bags hanging from Steven’s arm. “Feathers?”

“No, no feathers,” Steven said mournfully. He swung the bags through the doorway and checked out the other man on the couch. He’d known from the first twang that Joe was playing with Brad, but Brad was on the stool. This other guy didn’t have an instrument and was looking at Steven with mild surprise but not unfamiliarity, and it took Steven’s mind’s eye a second to slap on enough make-up to place him. “Honey, you should’ve called and told me we were entertaining. I would’ve picked up something for dinner.”

David sang in one of the other groups on tour with them, a glam-rock revival band that was getting loads of good press but that was having even more internal issues than they were. At least one of them was using hard drugs, although their handlers mostly managed to keep that contained to their trailers, and that alone was enough to make Steven leery of them. 

Right now David looked sober enough, eyes were fine and hands weren’t too rigid or too jerky, and he greeted Steven with a polite smile and an offer to help Steven out with the bags, which Steven was going to decline when somebody started shrieking David’s name outside. He went glassy-eyed as a junkie off the first hit, then swore and vaulted over Brad like he was trying out for Olympic track and field. He was nearly out the back door when Joe put his guitar aside and said, “Cyrinda?”

“Fuck,” David answered, and disappeared.

“Hiding from the wife again?” Steven said. He dropped his bags on the coffee table and then slid in next to Joe’s guitar. He did know Cyrinda. Bombshell, total bombshell, in all meanings of the word. She’d come up to talk to him before their very first show, flirty but also very, very high, and Steven had nearly blown the opening song trying not to think about how much he sometimes missed everything that would put that dreamy look in _his_ eyes. And then had spent the next three songs hissing at Joe to stop fucking making his ears bleed, only to have Joe mutter back that he could go have Cyrinda lick them out, and that had been three whole Skype calls with the therapists by itself. Cyrinda had been fine every other time since but certain things colored one’s view of a person.

Anyway, Steven had spent a lot of time learning all about himself since he’d gotten clean. He was somebody who had to live in the world and he couldn’t isolate himself from temptation, but there was that and then there was inviting it to come eat at his table and borrow his bed and use his fucking toothbrush. He might be misguided sometimes but he wasn’t stupid.

Brad had just said something, which Steven had missed because of his navel-gazing, but since Brad was walking off when Steven finally looked up, Steven assumed it wasn’t that important. At least, not as important as Joe moving the guitar so Steven could curl himself up against the other man. “So what were we doing? Pity party, table for three?”

Joe looked at Steven, slipping a slide onto his finger, and then frowned down at his strings. “What, we fighting again? I thought we made up.”

Steven opened his mouth, then caught himself and just buried his face in Joe’s shoulder. Tense as hell, Joe was, but he didn’t elbow Steven off. He glanced over one more time, then slouched down a little more and messed around with a couple chords. One of them, a real moaning kind of thing, it hooked into Steven. Maybe it was the last two days or the cornfields or whatever, but he pushed himself up when he heard it. Joe maybe got it too, because after a couple chords he went back to it.

By then Steven had his phone out and the recording app on. He held it out for a couple seconds, but his arm got tired so he leaned forward and put that on the table, next to his bags. “That was cool. Do another one, like, I don’t know, a—”

Joe segued higher and it was just such a great little pair of chords, just these shivering things that tingled your nerves, and then Joe went into some damn Hendrix quote and it was completely wrong and Steven almost wanted to smack him for it. One more for a trio and that’d be practically a riff, something to hang a song on, and damn it. Steven put his head in his hands, then put out one of those hands to turn off the app.

“What?” Joe said. “I thought you were liking it.”

“I did,” Steven said, pulling his head up. He propped his chin on his hand and looked over. “Just—it was going real good, and then it went—I don’t know, I just don’t think you should kick back in with the picking so quick.”

“Borrow Joey’s drums and we could see how it plays out,” Joe said. Watching Steven right back, fuck-you in his eyes but his hands were curling back over the strings, tight like claws, not loose enough to really not be giving a shit about Steven’s opinion. Then he flicked them out and flattened them down, the bottleneck clicking against his frets. “Brad said you and Joey talked it out.”

Steven pursed his lips, then pushed himself back into the couch. “Brad did?”

“Well, what now?” Joe spun his guitar off his lap and down safe in the corner, his fucking baby, couldn’t let Steven break it but could let himself come pretty damn close to breaking Steven. “First you’re all on me for not talking to them, and then when I do, you—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You can talk to Brad all you want, Joe,” Steven sighed. “He’s like home plate. Can’t get much safer than that, even chaperoning Johansen and you.”

“I’m not fucking relapsing,” Joe snapped, rearing back, face dark and threatening, like looking inside the barrel of a gun. Then he stopped. His eyes drew a tighter bead on Steven, then opened up as his brows rose. He pulled his arm back and dug his elbow into the side of the couch. Then he pushed the hair out of his face, blinking slowly. “Wait. Steven.”

Steven almost said something, just to get Joe back to being mad, because he had poor emotional judgment like that, and then he just went with turning away from Joe’s incredulous staring. He got one of his bags over and started digging through it, snapping off tags with his thumbnail.

“What,” Joe said. He pushed the side of his hand into Steven’s side. “Steven, okay, explain this one to me, because David’s—not—”

“Oh, just fucking laugh at me already,” Steven muttered. “Just get it out of your system. I mean, who the fuck cares if I walk in on you and Brad jamming with another singer.”

Joe stopped shoving at him, which was just about when Steven ran out of tags. He reached for the next bag, then just flopped head first into the bags, outstretched arm and all. He was too fucking ridiculous sometimes. His therapists probably got off the phone with him and went straight to rolling on the floor laughing, giving it up until they cried mercy because he was such a riot to listen to. Survived line-up shake-ups, survived drugs, survived not having a voice, survived Joe fucking Perry’s idea of courting, and…Steven raised his head, then grabbed at Joe’s hands too late to keep the other man from hauling him backwards by the waist. 

His right foot caught under the table, nearly upended it, and then jerked free, throwing him off-balance. He had to leave off pushing at Joe to claw at the back of the sofa, which basically just put him more firmly against the other man. And Joe didn’t miss a trick, sliding one arm around Steven’s waist, wrapping his other hand over Steven’s knee, locking his chin down over Steven’s shoulder. 

“Joe, are we cuddling?” Steven finally said.

“Yeah.” Joe pulled his chin off Steven’s shoulder, leaning his face against Steven’s head instead. “Either that or watch you suffocate in fucking shopping bags, and that would be the stupidest way to break up the band—you’d better not take that as a fucking dare to come up with something worse, Steven.”

Steven hung onto the back of the sofa for another moment, then gave up and slumped into the other man. His head slid down Joe’s front a couple inches before he got his foot braced himself to push back up, because suffocating in Joe’s hair would also be pretty fucking ridiculous. “I get like, flashbacks. Not literally, okay? It’s not like that one movie with the people chopping off heads, where every time somebody blinked you went back to eighteen-eighty-five or whatever, but it’s just déjà vu on a really, really bad trip, and…”

“Highlander,” Joe said. He moved his head just enough to look at Steven. “The movie?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Steven snorted. He pushed around on the couch cushion with his toes. “Okay. Anyway.”

“Anyway, whatever, you can have bad trips while completely sober and I can damn well cuddle if I feel like it, and I’m going to break the legs of anyone who tries to take you out of the band, whether I like them or not,” Joe told him. Matter-of-fact, looking at him, fucking cuddling him, and like everything Joe Perry did, it just looked cool. 

Steven twisted around, then nearly cracked his chin on Joe’s chest when his knee slipped on the couch, and yeah, now Joe was laughing at him. He swore, pushing his hand past the other man for something to hold onto, and then got his head high enough to make Joe shut up. 

Pretty easy to do that, actually, just open his mouth a little, let all the warmth from Joe’s breath slide in there, doing all the work for Steven, and push Joe farther down on the couch. Steven got his hand out from under Joe’s arm and batted at some of the hair trying to sneak in between their mouths, then splayed his fingers and pinned that back. Left his thumb free to slip behind Joe’s ear, drawing circles along the skin there, right in time with Joe fitting his hands around Steven’s hips. Still fucking sore and stiff, Steven vaguely remembered, but it got harder to do that when Joe was running his fingers down Steven’s legs like that, light and careless and slow.

“Oh, God,” Steven muttered, sitting back. He had to blink a few times before he could remember why he possibly would want to make Joe stop doing that. “Okay, anyway, so David’s just over to get away from Cyrinda?” He rolled his eyes at Joe’s scowl. “No, now I’m asking because I just want to know how many other fights we’ve got going on. I mean, and I mean it sincerely, it’s honestly a good thing you’re getting friends and doing something about that antisocial streak of yours, Joe, and I do fully support it when I’m not having flashback trauma, because God knows we’re running out of people in the band who’ll pretend to like us.” 

“So what, you didn’t talk to Joey?” Joe said. When Steven corrected him, he actually looked more annoyed. Then he shrugged and looked off to the side, absently pushing at his hair. “Like I said, talked to Brad, he thought it was all a fucking circus too. Didn’t talk to Tom because he was out.”

Steven stared at him. “You went over?”

“Yeah, what?” Joe pulled up his shoulders, then pulled up the ends of his mouth the same way. Sarcastic, stiff, and then loosening up with relief so obvious it was dancing a cancan when Steven laid down on top of him. “Again, like I said, I don’t see what the hell there is to talk _about_ , but maybe he thinks there’s something. And fine, if it’s going to be that big a deal, I’ll ask. But he wasn’t there.”

“Went shopping,” Steven muttered. He pushed around at Joe’s shirt—back to baggy buttondowns and jeans now—till he could get his hand under it, curling over warm skin. “Not with me, asshole. With Terry. God knows where, too, because there are about five stores in the whole place and Laura and Ray and me hit up all of them and didn’t see hide nor hair of them. Not that I was looking that hard, because honestly, I’m just fucking tired. I just want to do these last few shows and go back to Boston.”

Joe snorted, which also sounded a lot like some snide comment about Ray’s hitting abilities, but Steven was going to let that one go in light of everything else. He moved one of his hands to Steven’s back, then took it off to poke at one of the bags. “So if there aren’t feathers, what did you get?”

“Are you actually interested in my clothes?”

“I guess I’m interested in whether you got some thing with a hundred fucking hooks again, that’s going to tear off my fingernails,” Joe said after a moment’s thought. He gave Steven one of his half-smiles, which was one hundred percent arrogant bastard but which also was just fucking _hot_. If they could run the show off that, they wouldn’t need a single generator.

Steven rolled his eyes anyway, because they’d just spent so much effort on re-establishing his self-esteem and all and so it’d be a waste if he didn’t continue nurturing it. He let his head slide more towards the side of Joe’s chest. “Joe, you know, you could just let me take it off first.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t feel like doing that,” Joe told him. Hands back on Steven’s hips, really, seriously taking issue with Steven’s clothes now, and Steven guessed they were done talking. Which was fine with him.

* * *

Tom showed up on time for the show. He didn’t talk to anyone except for Brad and apparently had turned into Superman, because he managed to get changed into his stage clothes without using any of the rooms dedicated to them, but he didn’t start any obvious shit. Of course, his usual dedication to the same five square feet of stage space made that easy enough on him—Steven was the one who had to make up for the lack of action at _that_ end of the damn stage and who had his lungs crawling up his throat way before they got to Joe’s songs and he could take a breather.

He normally just ducked back for some water and a quick touch-up, depending on how much eyeliner was smearing down his face, but this time Steven went down on his forearms and knees behind the drum riser, trying to convince himself that yes, he _could_ get back up there even if his ribs collapsed on him.

Ray and another roadie were pulling at him, either holding him up or trying to toss him back out there before Joe’s limited ability to act like somebody who knew how to sustain a note gave out. Steven let them sit him up against the riser, but then pushed one of them off and went for the water bottle again. Tried to go for it. His arms felt like somebody had replaced all the muscles with string cheese and he had to prop up the bottle on his knee to get it high enough, and even then half the water squirted down his chin instead of into his mouth. It was warm and felt like slime running down his skin.

Disgusted, Steven let the bottle slip through his hands and bounce off over the edge of the stage. He scooted up against the riser, wiping at his face, and caught Terry watching from the side. She stiffened up, then lifted her hand. Steven raised his own hand, tired and not thinking and just going by the rule of the public event—when in doubt, wave and smile—and then realized she was just trying to push back her hair. Terry frowned, then pushed back her shoulders and gave Steven a smile so thin and worn that he could see through the holes to the weariness.

Back to the show, Ray was screaming at him. Steven twisted over, peering through Joey’s feet and the drum stands, and saw Joe’s legs swinging back up to the mike for the last verse. He leaned on the riser for a couple more seconds, panting like a dog, sweat melding his clothes to him, and then shoved everything else but the next song out of his head.

“Great one,” Laura told them as they were coming off the encore.

Steven gave her a limp thumbs-up, then stumbled over something and flopped into Joey, who, veteran of a thousand drugged-up staggers home, dipped his head to take Steven’s arm and then hitched Steven up by the waist. “Hat?” Steven asked.

“Um.” Laura pursed her lips. “Well, that one, I don’t know…but we can talk about it later.”

“Oh, whatever, just toss it out,” Steven muttered. “I got that new coat today anyway.”

Joey laughed hoarsely, then ducked his head back out of Steven’s arm and just leaned them both back up against the wall. He punched a passing roadie in the shoulder and swiped both water bottles clipped to the man’s belt while the poor sap was falling over, handing one to Steven. “I _knew_ I shouldn’t have told you about that.”

“About what?” Joe had gotten slowed up by having to hand off his guitar, but he was making up for lost ground now, bearing down on them like the wrath of the heavens. “The fuck is the problem now?”

“Shopping?” Steven said, right over Joey’s sucked-in breath. He swung his arm out, pushing his bottle into Joey’s chest and stopping him from stalking off like that sharp inhale had been promising to do. “Hey, you didn’t like it either.”

“Steven, would you just…” Joey muttered.

Joe’s eyes flicked over but his mouth was still pointed at Steven. “I didn’t like what?”

“My hat,” Steven said, stepping away from the wall. His foot went down but his knee locked funny and it acted funny too, sliding when it was supposed to be holding him up. 

He threw out his arms and Joey grabbed the left one and Joe the right, and for a moment Steven was hanging between them. Then Joe bent down and hooked Steven’s arm over the back of his neck, and stuck his hand behind Steven’s shirt—knotted around Steven’s waist since just before the encore—twisting his fingers up in one of the sleeves. Joey let go and Steven, off-balance again, scrabbled at Joe’s chest before finally managing to wrap his hand around the other man’s arm.

“So, a so-so for the wardrobe diary?” Laura asked.

“No, I mean, everything but the hat worked, right?” Steven got a mouthful of Joe’s hair, blew it out, and then blew Joe a kiss when he got an annoyed look over the shoulder. He tried to hook more of his arm over Joe’s neck, only to have it slip back when Joe turned under it, leaving Steven to grab Joe’s arm again. The bare-chested look definitely had its benefits, but good traction wasn’t one of them. “Nah, make it a good one. I mean, played my fucking legs off.”

Joe looked at him again, mouth quirked, and Steven leaned his head against Joe’s jaw before the man could figure out whether he was going to smile or not. Steven stretched out his arm and just managed to swipe at the water bottles Joey had, and after a second, Joey rolled his eyes and offered both of them.

“Don’t remember which one was yours,” Joey said.

“Been swapping spit for ages, Kramer,” Steven said. “Why so shy now?”

Joey almost looked at something just above Steven’s head, but then he just shrugged and handed over the two bottles. “I’m good anyway, I’m not up tonight. You better refuel before those girls take off your lips for souvenirs.”

“That shit’s not happening again. I told them, I’ll fucking set the place on fire first,” Joe said. He raised his hand like he was going to talk to Laura, then gave Joey a nod. “Hey, thanks.”

Then he took one of the water bottles from Steven. He pulled out the top with his teeth, squeezed water into his mouth, and then tossed the bottle aside, all while Joey eyed him like he wasn’t quite sure whether Joe had just cut off his knees or not. Steven was about to point out Joey’s working limbs when Joey finally gave himself a shake. Joey muttered something about seeing them at breakfast and then headed off, rubbing at his nervous eye.

“So what’s the program?” Joe said to Laura, sighing. He cut that short when Steven nuzzled at his ear, needing a second to reach around his head and pull the hair out of the way, and then he got back to the conversation and glowered at her.

“One VIP group, ten people, fifteen minutes,” Laura said. She glowered right back, pointing her phone at him like maybe she’d figured out how to download that Taser app she kept insisting existed. “You will be _pleasant_. You will not yell at them if they try to take souvenirs. You will call for security and let them throw them out. All right?”

Joe stopped helping Steven nuzzle his ear so he could wave his hand in disbelief at her. “Laura, they were trying to cut off pieces of our _hair_.”

“That one did really end up nicking my lip,” Steven added. “Though she was so upset about it, I did feel a little for her.”

“Steven, you were bleeding,” Joe started, exasperated and resigned and actually, not that upset. Then he saw something off to the right and bit down hard on the last word. His hand at Steven’s back suddenly jammed its knuckles into the base of Steven’s spine.

Terry met Steven’s eyes for a second, then turned away. She was trying to hide her free hand but Steven saw some fingertips moving past her hip and could figure out easy enough that she was suggesting a scenic detour. To his credit, Tom got that that would be like having a volcano blow up on you and then trying to pretend that all the hot ash melting your skin was just a really bad rainstorm. He didn’t want to do this, but he stood there and Joe stood there, because they had made eye contact and manly pride demanded that they fucking maintain till one of them had their eyeballs wither up.

Steven waved. Because yes, his teeth were clenched on edge and yes, he was fucking uncomfortable with this because yes, there was a whole fucking lot of tension floating around. There was so much tension that they could’ve populated the wastelands of Siberia with it. And he didn’t know what the hell to do with it, except that he needed to fucking do something with it and so yeah, he waved. He fronted a rock band. You couldn’t see shit past the first few rows because they were dark and you were light, so you just had to trust that the dark was friendly and you just lived with it. You fucking waved at it before it figured out it’d be way easier to swallow you than for you to burn it out.

Tom and Joe both started. Joe inhaled like he was going to tell Steven off, but didn’t, and then Tom moved his hand, which could be considered a return wave from the perspective of someone with the same desperate optimism as those fanatics who thought the Mayan calendar had calculated the date of the apocalypse. He paused for another second, then started off on that scenic detour, Terry in tow.

“Just do it and get it over with,” Laura said quietly. She pushed her hand back into her hair, pressing the heel of it into the side of her forehead. “Fifteen minutes. I’ll get Ray to stand there and time it.”

“Then who’s gonna bail him out for harassment?” Joe snorted. He and Laura eyed each other, and then she broke into a ragged, weary laugh while the corners of his mouth reluctantly curled up. “Okay. Okay, fine. Now fuck off.”

Steven opened his mouth, but Laura shook her head, still chuckling. She slid around them and off in the direction of the venue manager’s office, taking Steven’s water on the way. “Get your asses in the shower, boys. At least that way nobody’s trying to take sweat samples.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Steven finally said, watching her go.

Joe just sighed. He smiled again when Steven pressed a kiss to the side of his mouth, but it lasted barely long enough for Steven to pull back his head and see it. “ _I’ll_ time it,” he muttered. “Fuck it. Let’s get this done.”

* * *

By the time the fans were gone and they’d checked in with everybody they needed to check in with and Steven had talked his failing brain into locating the damn bed, it was suspiciously light on the horizon. He stared at the window for a moment, wondering why he was even seeing that, and then yanked down the shutter. Then he turned around, ready to ask Joe what the fuck the man was thinking, acting like they needed to know what time it was in the real world, and Joe pushed himself up on one arm like he’d been expecting some shit.

He hadn’t been expecting Steven to just sprawl on top of him. Joe went over with a grunt and a knee to Steven’s thigh, which hurt like hell but which Steven was too tired to really do anything about, aside from shoving his arm into Joe’s gut. They slid and flopped around, cursing at each other, till most of their limbs were sorted out, and then Steven tucked his head into Joe’s shoulder and grabbed Joe’s hand so it would stop moving the blanket around. “Go to sleep, motherfucker,” he said.

Joe gave the blanket one last flick, like he had enough of himself sticking out past Steven for that to matter, and then twisted his hand out of Steven’s grip. He laid still for three and a quarter seconds before he brought that hand up to touch Steven’s side, and not in a way that agreed with Steven’s immediate goal of turning out all lights in all places. “What, we’re done?”

“I don’t,” Steven started, and then he dragged up his head so he could look at the other man. “Look, I just don’t…do you?”

All he could see were Joe’s eyes. The whites of them, except now they were slivers of grey in the dark. “No, but you always—”

“Well, fuck what I always,” Steven said, putting his head back down. He waited for Joe to drop his hand. “Cuddle?”

Joe breathed in slowly, then turned his head, his hair whispering across the top of Steven’s head. Then he let out that breath in a slow, low rasp, not quite a laugh but related to it. A second cousin by way of a backwoods shotgun wedding, all reluctant and ornery but still there anyway. He moved his hand across Steven’s back, fitting it to the curve of Steven’s other side, just resting now and not keeping Steven up. Good enough, Steven thought, and turned his attention to sleep.

* * *

_HAMILTON: One problem was Joe and I still had a quiet, unspoken conflict going on. It didn’t get headlines like some of the other things going on at the time, but it ran deep._  
_PERRY: I didn’t understand what was the problem. My philosophy has always been that if it’s important, you say something. If it’s not, then there’s nothing to say anything about._  
_KRAMER: I always thought that they were lucky Steven had gone to therapy first, because even now he’s not really a peacemaker. It’s just not his bag. And I’m still surprised he didn’t kill them both out of pure frustration._  


They had a day off before the next show, which Steven mostly missed because he didn’t wake up. Somebody must have pried open his mouth a few times, since when he did finally drag open his eyes, way into the next state, he and his stomach were on friendly terms and it was his bladder that was trying to torture him into lying down and taking it.

Not being that type, even if he did sometimes think it was safer at ground-level, Steven crawled out of bed and into the bathroom. He vaguely registered someone else moving around in the trailer, but whoever it was, they didn’t come in to bother him, so he let that go in favor of cleaning himself up into something somewhat human.

The hot water wasn’t working in the shower, and whoever the fuck it was outside had left the towel sopping, so Steven, watching his blue toes curl against the floor, would’ve had better luck licking himself dry. He stomped back into the bedroom, cursing this hypothetical someone under his breath for being a thoughtless amp-obsessed bastard, and was in the middle of peeling some pants up his damp legs when that someone stuck his head through the doorway.

“You kiss Perry with that mouth?” Ray said.

Steven’s mind and his eyes failed to coordinate. He jerked to the side, his head going up and his ass going askew, and then scrabbled at his shins when his pants twisted his legs out from under him. Swearing, he did the smart thing a couple seconds too late and jammed his arm into the wall just as his ass hit the bed and Ray hit the hallway wall, laughing like the demented heartless banshee he was.

“Yes, actually,” Steven finally snapped. He pulled his arm down and rubbed at the half-numb side of it, then just gave up on dignity for the morning and finished tugging on his pants. “What can I say, Joe likes it dirty. Speaking of—”

“He got dragged off by Laura, something about issues with the promoter,” Ray said, coming back in. He was eating a bagel, part of which he offered to Steven. “If that belly of yours can’t wait, because he left you some food in the kitchen.”

Steven’s stomach was reconsidering their truce, but he shook his head and pried himself off the bed. “Long as it’s not a banana milkshake, I can hold out for it,” he said. He began shuffling through his shirts. “What’s up with the promoter?”

“Some bullshit. Not really sure what it was, but Laura said she just needed one of you to yell at them. I think she said she was going to text details to you for you to read when you got up.” Ray popped another chunk of bagel into his mouth, then stepped back as Steven went for his feet. “Jesus, Steven, I know you hate mornings, but—oh.”

His _phone_ , motherfucker. Halfway to unlocking it, Steven realized it might help if he finished putting his other arm through his shirt-sleeve. He did that, wriggled to make the rest of the shirt drift in a downwards direction, and then plopped himself down on the floor, legs crossed, to check on how the world had dealt with his absence. 

Promoter was being shitty and squeezing them for extra perks and Laura promised she was going to bring back Joe all pumped up from the hunt, ready to toss Steven over a shoulder and she was reading those trashy period romance novels again. Steven skipped over the rest of the blouse-ripping metaphors and got to the bottom part about some preshow interview after lunch. He wrote half a message back telling her to fuck off, deleted it, and finally just told her he was up and to tell Joe he owed Steven a couple towel-slaves while he was out conquering. Also, some emails and texts on what was happening back in Boston, the usual couple Big Brother messages from the label, and some whining from Joey about missing drumsticks and Steven needing to buy his own and blah blah still no appreciation for the love and care and attention Steven gave to Joey’s lazy-ass rhythm.

He looked up when Ray came back, then blinked because Ray had come back and he didn’t remember Ray going. Also, Ray had brought Steven food. Which wasn’t that uncommon, but usually it didn’t come on a plate and look that pristine. “Perry threatened to break my hands if I ate any,” Ray said, putting on a wounded air. “I would’ve left you some.”

“Yeah, I know. The burned bits.” Steven took the plate and balanced it on his knee as he kept going through his messages. He started with the eggs, digging in with his fingers since Ray’s random act of kindness hadn’t extended to utensils. “You want his cooking, you live with him.”

Ray snorted in a way that sounded suspiciously like a comment referencing Joe’s homicidal tendencies, and then he was quiet for a couple minutes. Just leaning against the wall, eating the rest of his bagel while Steven switched to the sausage.

“So Tom came by earlier,” he said. He shifted against the wall, looking anywhere but Steven when Steven looked up. “Hey, I gave up on getting into all that shit when I stopped playing with you guys, but whatever it’s been these past couple days…you gonna fix it?”

“What do I look like, a plumber? My ass-crack showing or something?” Steven muttered. He picked up a sausage-end and used it to stir around the dribbles of hot sauce left from the eggs. A couple swirls looked like a heart and he added bat wings. Then fangs. “He say anything? Tom?”

“Well, he was checking to see if Joe was around first.” After chewing through the last bit of bagel, Ray sighed and lowered himself to sit in front of Steven. He spared a grin for Steven’s drawing, then pulled his mustache down over his mouth to play the stern parent. “I don’t think he’s pissed at _you_ so much.”

Steven paused, sausage up, and then stabbed it into what was left of the eggs. He used the plate rim to scrape the grease off his fingers, then leaned back and looked at the other man. “Great for him. I’m still fucking pissed at him.”

“Look, Steven—”

“He leave a message? Or did he just come sniffing around hoping I was in a better mood than Joe?” Steven said. He skidded one nail through the bat wings, cutting them off from the heart. “I’m not Joe’s fucking minder. Tom wants to make nice, he needs to fucking talk to Joe.”

“Look, I don’t know exactly what he wanted,” Ray said, holding up his hands. “I don’t know if he wanted to see you or Joe, or both of you, or some fucking turkey in a tutu. He just asked if Joe was in, and when I said no, he said he’d come talk to you later. Didn’t say who ‘you’ meant, okay? I don’t want to—”

“No, we know, you don’t want to get into it,” Steven sighed. The hot sauce got into a cut on his finger that he didn’t know he had and started to sting. So he sucked it off, and then his mouth started to sting. He thought about throwing the plate, because at least then something else would be in shittier shape than he was, and then he remembered he was supposed to be better-adjusted and less destructive these days. And also, Joe threw fits about the food stains.

Steven elbowed himself off the floor—Ray helped him out with a shove up under one arm—and headed for the kitchen, the other man in tow. He wrapped up what was still on the plate and stuck it back into the fridge, and then went to the sink to run his hands under the tap. Ducked his head for a couple mouthfuls, not that that did too much to get rid of the hot sauce, and also, moving like that pulled a ton of sore muscles. The mouth he could live with, he decided, and concentrated on making his finger stop stinging.

“I’m just not that into fighting,” Ray said. “I mean, brawling, hell yes, I’ll jump in feet first. But what you all do…”

“I’m really glad you came back.” Steven knocked off the tap with his wrist, then tore a paper towel off the roll and corkscrewed it around his finger. “You could’ve just said to hell with us all, after we kicked you out like that, and…”

“Hey, you were going to do that anyway.” Ray didn’t even look hurt about it these days. Just grinned at Steven, like they were old-timers reminiscing on the porch with lemonade. “Even if Perry hadn’t shown up, and it’s a good thing he did because you fucking needed somebody in there with you.”

“Yeah. Yeah, but still, I wasn’t big on doing it like _that_. Even if that’s the only way it was going to happen,” Steven said after a moment, staring at his hands. “Anyway, it’s good to still have you around, Ray.”

Ray aww’ed him, and then while Steven was still marveling at that, reached over and damn near bear-hugged the lungs out of Steven. He set Steven back against the counter to gasp and went to the fridge to dig out a bottle of water. “No problem. You still need somebody to kick your ass once in a while, and I might be a fan of Perry these days but that’s not usually what he’s doing with _that_.”

Steven shrugged and grinned. Only honest response possible, and when in doubt, be honest was the rule for recovering fuck-ups—only fucking thing all his therapists agreed on.

“Anyway, look, Tom came by, don’t know what it was about, maybe you should go see what it is. I’m not trying to start shit or prolong shit, but I was just thinking it’d be better to ask than to just find out whenever he decides to bring it up again, however the fuck he’s thinking about doing that,” Ray said. “And hell, if he’s a problem, I’ll kick his ass too. I didn’t give up those rights when I took my sabbatical from you abusive little motherfuckers. All right?”

* * *

All right, no, but Ray had a point and Steven wasn’t very good at ignoring points. Besides, they tended to lie around waiting for him to trip and fall ass-first on them at the worst times.

Joe and Laura were still out by the time Steven ventured forth from the trailer, and Joe was on one of those stretches where he never answered any fucking communication medium, up to and including blast texts to everyone on Steven’s contact list ordering them to glue an Internet-enabled device to Joe’s hand or risk the Tallarico feather torture. He claimed it was because typing was too limiting and replying would be easier to do in person. Personally, Steven thought the stonefaced son of a bitch just liked seeing his message stats blow through the roof.

Anyway, Joe wasn’t saying _not_ to do it, so Steven hunted up Tom. He checked the trailer, scared Terry, checked that that high heel she’d chucked at him really hadn’t taken off a cheekbone, and then checked with Joey and Brad. Joey had nothing except a packet of Japanese bonito-flavored Pringles, courtesy of a roadie with a bizarre imported-snack fetish, but Brad directed Steven towards the half-built stage.

Tom was hanging out on some amps, watching the roadies lay down the cables. He declined the Pringles but gave Steven a hand up onto the amps. “Steven, I love you, but there’s tempting fate and then there’s going up to it and smacking it in the face,” he said, eyeing the chip in Steven’s hand. “And you said that Joey gave it to you? Don’t you remember what happens when Joey gives you food?”

“One, it was still sealed when I got it. Tamper-proof, FDA-approved.” Steven popped the chip into his mouth. For a fish-flavored chip, it wasn’t bad, even though he was having a hard time figuring out what vaguely bacon-like essence had to do with fish. “Two, I’m not smacking fate in the face. At this point I have way too much respect to treat her like that. I’m laying out the whole rose petals candlelight shebang, really wooing her.”

“I might be a little wet-blanket here, but I’m not sure fate is something you want to be trying to fuck either,” Tom said dryly.

“Yeah, well, we all know you’re not the one driving me to the ER this time,” Steven said. Sharp, way sharp, and if that had been a guitar string instead of his voice, he would’ve been trying to snap it so it’d never massacre a note like that again.

Even Tom got it, and his ear still made Steven wring his hands in despair. He leaned on his hands, shifting his perch. “I think I drove you plenty of times.”

“Well, you had to go and be the only one with a car for how long?” Then Steven crushed in the middle of the Pringles can. He heard a lighter, crisper crunch and looked down into the tube, then sighed as he realized he hadn’t finished off all the chips first. Then he just threw the can at the nearest dumpster, because really, who the fuck cared? Wasn’t that the point of them finally getting somewhere? Maybe they weren’t gazillionaires yet, but they sure weren’t scraping the mold off the back of the fridge anymore. 

They weren’t exactly tripping the light fantastic either, sitting out here amid the cornfields, wasting chips and time. Shit.

“Look, Tom, when you say you love me,” Steven started.

“Are we on that again?” Tom dug out a pair of sunglasses from his jacket and put them on. The left arm was kinked so badly he looked like a pirate with an eyepatch and a shiny birthmark on his cheek. He took them off and began twisting the arm. “Steven. For the last time, honestly.”

“I know that’s not what you mean and I’m not pining away for lack of fucking you or trying to fuck _with_ you, all right? It’s just I don’t know how the fuck else to talk about this. I have fucking therapists for codependency and sex, not for figuring out what’s the fucking problem with you and Joe,” Steven snapped, flopping backwards. The amp was too short and nearly all of his head went over the far edge, making him grab Tom’s arm to keep all the sorry depressing weight in his skull from dragging the rest of him over. Then he pushed himself up on his elbows, staring at the people stringing up the lights around the stage. “Goddamn it. Laura so called it.”

There was a snap and a swear, and then the pieces of Tom’s shades went soaring over Steven in the direction of the dumpster. Tom swore again, more irritably, so he’d missed. “Laura called what? I thought she spent any time she had outside of running this show on trying to run your sex life.”

“Hey, she _facilitates_ ,” Steven said. He drummed his fingers on the amp, just to hear the resonance, and then realized he was doing the bridge from the stupid fucking half-written single they were supposed to have finished five shows ago. “She said screw the psychologists and if I didn’t want to talk to you, then I shouldn’t.”

Tom cocked his head, his lips pressed tight together, and Steven started to sit up because yes, he and Laura had talked and she had said that but she had absolutely not meant to shoehorn herself into the shit, because she was smarter than that. And he liked her being smarter than that. That was why he talked to her anyway, and that was why sober him was trying to not just toss the good people into the fucking shit, because these days he knew how hard it was to find those people.

“I guess she must be wondering why she signed onto this shitshow,” Tom finally said. He looked over at Steven, then brought out one of his shark smiles. In that sharks weren’t really slimy, sneaky bastards like that metaphor usually signified, but actually were cool and thoughtful about how they went about their business. Which was killing, and there was a reason why Joey got hurt feelings and Brad ducked for cover and Tom just stood still. “I have been around for a while, Steven. I know that’s Tyler-speak for Laura tried to talk you out of starting shit—”

“I know you’ve been around. Kind of hard to miss the big fucking blond with the bass anchoring the whole shebang, you know.” Steven saw Tom’s smile thin out, like it was being hollowed from behind, and pushed himself up to poke the other man in the arm. “You know what, we’re not going to talk about it.”

Tom raised his brows. “We’re not?”

“Nope.” Steven shook his head, then twisted around as he heard something. Then he realized it was his phone and he twisted back, pulling that out. “No, because it’s not about the music, whatever it is, and right now we just have to take care of the music. And I’m not saying that like nothing fucking matters except earning a fucking paycheck. I’m saying it because that _is_ what we all care about, and what we don’t argue over. So why drag that into it?”

It was Joe. Texting back. Texting back, and saying that he’d turned the phone—which Steven had bought for him, like all his fucking phones since he’d moved into Steven’s bunkbed and band and brain—on silent because of the meeting and it was absolutely not an apology, but that was just as well. An apology on top of that might have rendered Steven completely catatonic.

“We’re going to run out of shows, Steven,” Tom was saying. When Steven looked up, Tom started, then shrugged and turned away. “Then what?”

“Well, then I turn into a pumpkin and all my glass slippers shatter,” Steven muttered. He glanced at his phone a last time, just checking that it hadn’t turned into some sort of reality warp, and then put it away. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out when we get there. But just because the music stops doesn’t mean that the fucking band does, Tom.”

“I always wondered how much of your babbling was the drugs,” Tom said, musing. He fended off Steven’s punch, then sighed and helped Steven not fall off the amp. “But I guess it wasn’t those.”

Steven began to push himself back, then decided if gravity wanted him down that badly, he might as well give up on that fight. He slid off the amp, borrowing Tom’s leg as a makeshift rope, and then slapped down the man’s attempt to kick him. “Therapist one thinks changing my leadership style and becoming a nurturer is a big step forward for me, and that you should be supportive and receptive, motherfucker.”

“Therapist one always seemed the dodgiest to me,” Tom snorted. He pulled his legs up out of reach. “I’m supportive, Steven. I’m so fucking supportive that…look, never mind. You’re right. It’s two shows. I don’t want to wreck it this close to the end.”

For a moment Steven thought about climbing back up there. His hand was still gripping the top edge of the amp and all he’d have to do is pull up. Then he shook his head and pulled that down. He wiped it absently on his thigh, looking up at Tom. “I’m fucking tired, you know,” he said quietly. “It’s funny. I thought getting my voice back was going to mean less running around, since I knew what I was meant to do again. All I ever wanted to do was have a band.”

“Yeah.” Tom leaned back, like he was done with their talk, and then he moved his hand to keep Steven from going. He paused, flexing his fingers around an imaginary bass neck, and then put his hand down. “Listen, Steven, you don’t have to—we’re all adults here.”

“I could say a lot of things about that, but Laura pretty much covers them every morning,” Steven said.

“And that’s why we let her run our lives,” Tom said, smirking. Then he ran his hand over his face and back across the top of his head, sending his mouth back to serious. “I mean, it’s good that you do, and your therapist can fuck off because I can be supportive without handing you a goddamn gold star all the time and none of them actually have to _live_ with your ego. But Joe and I managed to relate before he decided that you’re the half of him who talks. That’s all.”

Which was a lie at best, and Steven geared up to take it on and then remembered they were trying to just let it rest for now. Just…let it go, let it see if it really wanted to grow up into some maniacal psycho killer or whether it just was an awkward fucking kid like them, whatever the date on their birth certificates. Not everything had to be taken care of at once. Even if that just killed the little obsessive-compulsive shit with the magnifying glass inside of him.

“Yeah, well, see you around,” Steven finally said.

He stepped back, then turned halfway around. Tom saw him off with a nice little wave, and Steven left the other man still sitting on the amp, watching their crew rebuild them their world.

* * *

The trouble with the promoter was your typical greedy son of a bitch trouble, thinking that just because they were a band on the up-and-up with a well-known history of substance abuse, they didn’t know basic mathematics. Well, okay, they probably didn’t, since when you were poor other people counted the pennies for you and when you were rich, you didn’t have to count fucking pennies. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t hire people who did, and that sure didn’t mean that Joe couldn’t come back smug and full of himself like he was the one who’d done the hiring.

“You didn’t either,” Joe snapped, stalking into the sound booth. He kicked aside a chair and then threw himself into the other one, twisting around to glower up at Steven. All that smugness had withered away like somebody had flipped the lights all the way up on the pot farm. “I don’t know why I fucking bother.”

“Well, because Miss E did _something_ over there, which we can’t talk about even though it makes walking around here like walking in a fucking minefield on steroids,” Steven slung back. He pushed the door shut and then leaned on it. “Seriously, Joe, I can’t even fucking talk to anybody who’s even had a layover in Heathrow. Because they start going ‘what, you didn’t know about this’ and then I have to go ‘don’t fucking tell me’ because—”

Joe’s brows nearly burned off his forehead, they went up so fast. “Right. You are the biggest fucking gossip, Steven.”

“Because that’s the only way to get anything out of you sometimes!” Steven threw up his hands, then yanked the right one down as he banged his elbow against the door. He pulled it into his side and stared out the glass front of the booth. “And you fucking know what my exes had for their last supper.”

“It’s not like I ask you to tell me all that,” Joe said.

“Yeah, but you don’t tell me to stop either. And if you didn’t want to hear it, you wouldn’t hear it. Because that’s how you are,” Steven muttered.

Joe kicked something, making Steven look back at him. He was all contorted in the chair, legs jammed straight out into the bottom of the booth, one arm thrown back over the top of the chair, other one with its elbow on the chair arm and the hand-end eaten by his hair. “Well, you don’t like that, I can’t do anything about that.”

“This what Tom was putting up with way back when?” Steven said.

Joe brought his head up with a snap that Steven felt in the back of his own neck. He stared at Steven, beyond angry. Way beyond, off in his own fucking dimension where everything stayed the hell away from him and didn’t bother him and just let him do his fucking thing.

Not that his thing looked too fucking happy, Steven thought. Then Steven pushed himself harder against the door, pulling that thought back again, pushing aside the one about him really getting used to Joe if he could do that under Joe glaring, because goddamn it, he could focus when he wanted to. When he had to.

“Are we going back to that?” Joe finally said.

“No.” Steven shrugged off Joe’s disbelieving snort and stretched out his leg. He hooked over the other chair, twisted it around and then grabbed the top, kneading it. “No, asshole, because I’m not your fucking therapist. I’m your fucking vocalist and the love of your fucking life. So you know, you can go deal with your thing with Tom, or don’t. And tell me why the hell everyone who knew you two runs off screaming when you and Elyssa come up. Or don’t. You can be yourself. It’s fine, I just have live with it, after all.”

Joe pushed himself forward, dropping his hands between his knees. He ran his hands around each other, then unknotted them and sat back again, dropping his arms over the sides of the chair. “What do you want, anyway? Am I supposed to tell you everything?”

“You’re supposed to tell me,” Steven started, and then he yanked back the chair and knocked himself in the gut. Coughed that out on his way to doubling over the chair, stretching till he could nearly press his face into the seat cushion. He held that for a second, then stood up and let all the blood rush out of his head. “I just said. Whatever you want, all right? Even if that’s nothing. It’s not about what you tell me. It’s just I don’t know why the fuck you’re doing things. I don’t know why you listen to me sometimes and you don’t—”

“I listen to you all the time,” Joe said. He pursed his mouth a few times, looking at Steven, and then got up and came over till the chair in front of Steven blocked him. Then he looked down at it. “I don’t…I still don’t know what the fuck you’re _saying_ sometimes, you know? Because you do go pretty fucking out there. But I do hear what you say.”

Steven rolled his eyes, then nearly sprained them when Joe grabbed his shoulder and shook him. He jerked backwards, then had to scrabble for a handhold on the door-knob while Joe kneed the chair out of the way. “Yeah, but why?”

“Because you’re the love of my life?” Joe sighed. He loosened his grip on Steven’s shoulder so his fingers slid down to more circle Steven’s upper arm. “And I still don’t know what the hell you do out there, sometimes, you know? I’m watching and I don’t get it, and…I guess other people do, because they’ve been around longer.”

“What, like certain people whose names start with T? He doesn’t, Joe. He’s just really good at acting like he knows when I’m coming back down,” Steven said. He let go of the knob and pulled at his shirt, then pushed the hair back from his face. “I’m just flying. I’d drag you out there if you’d let me.”

“And telling you about the shitty parts of my life is going to do that,” Joe said skeptically.

Steven shrugged, his hand still in his hair, and then dropped that hand to clasp at his neck. “Well, it’d mean I’d know why you don’t want to go out to there, or there, or right there, over by Big Ben.”

The side of Joe’s mouth moved a little, maybe upwards, or maybe that was just people testing the lighting outside. “I just don’t like going back,” Joe finally said. “Never saw the point in it. You can’t change anything.”

“But I haven’t been there yet,” Steven pointed out. “It’d be my first time.”

“And you’d want to go there?”

“Joe, have you talked to the other guys in the band? I mean, aside from when we’re all screaming at each other? Because I distinctly remember you and Tom always going off in corners the first couple months, with lots of meaningful pointing at me, and I _know_ Joey can’t keep his mouth shut to save his life, and there is no fucking way that you didn’t know the places I’ve gone, even before you decided to co-opt my therapy.” Steven put his head back on the door and looked at the other man. Looked at him and his defensive deployment of his fucking hair, and his slouching shoulders, and the wariness in his eyes. “I’m basically going there anyway. You might as well give me the guided tour.”

For another moment Joe watched him like he thought Steven was going to whip out a machete if he closed his eyes. Then he snorted. The seal of his lips cracked down, showing some white, and then he gave the rest of his smile to the fucking undeserving floor. “Why the hell do we always end up screaming at each other anyway? I thought you just wanted to talk about not waking you up for dealing with the promoter.”

“Yeah, well, we’re going to talk about that too, but you stalking me’s higher up on my list,” Steven said. “You _were_ , right? All that whispering in the corners, that was gathering intel, and—”

“Okay, fine, I guess there’s something to talk to Tom about, because he was pretty fucking happy to tell me what to do and not do to get on your good side, and now he’s being a prick that that worked out,” Joe muttered. He shoveled the hair off one side of his face, trying futilely to bunch it down the opposite shoulder, and then gave up and just let it fall forwards, blocking out the rest of the world one curl at a time. “I wasn’t stalking you. I just didn’t get you. I still don’t get you.”

“What’s there to get? I’m crazy.” Steven shrugged. “Also, amazing, and crazy amazing is just irresistible.”

Joe took his hand off Steven and put his palm flat against the wall, leaning on it, looking at Steven, annoyed and amused in equal parts. “Yeah, well, then why wouldn’t I listen to you all the time?”

“You came in when I was just crazy,” Steven said after a long pause. “Why would you do that?”

“What, is this about your voice?” The edge of disbelief to Joe’s voice cut pretty damn far low, and Joe must have seen that, because he grimaced and dropped his head for a second. He let his arm bend, so when he pulled his head back up, he and Steven’s faces were almost touching. “Look, call _me_ crazy, but—I knew it was going to come back. I don’t know—I just knew. Because that thing I saw in that video, that thing I knew I wanted to be part of, it was too good to just go away. So all I had to do was wait. And you did make me fucking do that.”

“Well, I might be crazy, but I ain’t easy,” Steven grinned. He laughed at Joe’s disgusted growl, then reached up and worked his hand around Joe’s hair till he could slide it around the back of the other man’s neck. “I still don’t know if I get that, but I guess I can—”

“If I have to fucking talk about Elyssa and Tom to make you get that, I’ll fucking talk about them,” Joe said. Still disgusted, dragging every word out of himself, more grudging with that than he was about turning down his amps, but he meant each one. “Jesus, Steven. I stopped looking when I got to you. What else do you need to know?”

Steven opened his mouth, then shook his head and leaned forward. Not quite straight and he felt Joe’s lips grazing past his cheek, half-parted, thinking he was going for something else when even that was just too…trying too hard, pushing it too fast and loud when it was just one of those beautiful long arcs, just gliding along and all you really needed to do was just follow the notes, let them carry you. So he needed another breath first. A second to get himself together, pressing his face into Joe’s hair, and then he pulled back and pulled Joe’s mouth onto his own.

There was a click and then a clattering roll. Joe jerked back, glanced to the side and then cursed into Steven’s shoulder. Outside the booth Laura and Ray and a couple other roadies were waving their phones and grinning like loons. Laura jabbed at the glass, then held up her phone for another photo.

“Jesus Christ, fuck off,” Joe muttered. He slouched himself around and gave Laura’s flash the finger, then frowned at Steven. “What?”

“Nothing, honey. Just love it when you’re an asshole,” Steven said. He hooked his arm around Joe’s neck and pulled him in for a smacking kiss on the cheek—Laura took another photo, giving him a thumbs-up—and Joe might have been insulting Steven’s parentage up and down the block, but he was still putting his hands on Steven’s ass. “So okay, I love you, you love me, I think I’m fine with you bitching out this promoter so long as I get the next one, we’re not going to talk about Tom but we will talk about Elyssa. I think that that’s a working roadmap to a healthy, happy life together.”

Joe looked at him. Then at the people outside. Then back at Steven. “I was being serious.”

“And so am I. You think I’d put up with you scowling all over my life if I didn’t love your moody, antisocial, controlling stalker ass, Perry?” Steven snorted. “I talk to a lot of people, okay, but you’re the only one who I care whether they’re really fucking listening or not.”

Joe took his hands off Steven’s ass and stepped back, and Steven thought they were leaving. But instead Joe grabbed his face and pulled him in for a knee-knocking, tongue-fucking, head-spinning deep one, set to the tune of Laura’s delighted squealing. Steven had to dig his nails into Joe’s shoulders and even then he was barely hanging on, even when Joe broke it off to just stand there and be a smug fucking bastard, looking at what he’d managed to do to Steven for Laura to record for all fucking posterity. 

Sometimes it was worth just letting Joe have his moments. Steven would get his eventually, anyway. That was why they worked.

* * *

_WHITFORD: Taking that break in between the tour and the album turned out to be one of the best moves we ever made. I don’t think we realized how close we were to burning out till we just got off the treadmill._  
_KRAMER: It was really quiet without Joe and Steven around. I suddenly couldn’t sleep because I missed them yelling at each other, and I think we all felt that something was missing without each other._  
_PERRY: I think the time off gave everybody the space to just take stock of things, you know? And think about what really mattered, and what we wanted to do next. And what everybody realized was that they really wanted to keep this thing we had together._  


The last two shows went without any major hitches. They ended the tour on the West Coast, flying back across the country the next morning, with the label throwing them a big party at a swanky hotel like it had always believed they were going to make it. Joe and Tom looked like they were getting along to outsiders because they both had a lot of fun bitching about that, but Steven wasn’t going to ruin a party over that one. They were survivors and damn it, that was something to celebrate, however the bill was getting paid. _Especially_ if the bill was getting paid and they weren’t responsible for it.

There was booze, obviously, because it was a party for the whole tour and they might have their designated clean ‘n sober rooms but nobody was checking addict cards in the hallways. And if Steven wasn’t walking in on some South American import in the bathrooms, then somebody had cut off his nose because even going on two years clean, he knew that shit. He could practically feel it in the air, making his skin tingle, and for a while it was just part of the background, the champagne and laughter and bright lights, but then it started getting to him and he needed a breather and a call to the therapist. He knew the label had their people watching every step and look and twitch he made, trying to figure out if he was backsliding, but he knew if he wanted to, he probably could get away from them. For a little while. Till he fucked it all to hell again and couldn’t talk anyone into covering it up.

He borrowed a niche in the wall, a real old-fashioned little hole with the bust of some stern dead guy and a pretty fringed curtain across the top, with gold thread in the tassels—Steven pulled out a couple during the call and knotted them into his hair for lack of anything else to keep his hands busy—and was just finishing up his talk when somebody knocked into the wall beside him. Then Cyrinda and David stumbled by, giggling, higher than the satellites. Cyrinda unwound herself from David quick when she saw Steven, leaving her husband to pitch towards the marble floor. “Helloooo,” she said, flicking her shades up and down her nose. They were heart-shaped and sparkly, real kitschy flirty. “So here’s where he got to.”

“Okay, fuck, David, don’t…” Sighing, Joe yanked David back by one arm, kind of slewing him on the pivot of his feet into the wall, and then disengaged just before David started mistaking a vase for a sickbin. Joe watched him for a moment, rubbing at the side of his face. Then he turned towards Cyrinda. “Look, I think you’d better…”

Or where Cyrinda had been, except now she was blocking Steven from getting out of the niche, heart-shaped sparkly shades cooing right up in Steven’s face. Something about hiding his star under a pail, her high getting real talkative, real incoherent, and…it was so weird listening to it from the other side. It sort of made sense of all the times people had told Steven that he sounded like he was regurgitating the English language through an alien baby’s brain.

Well, okay, they hadn’t _said_ that, but that was what they’d been saying with their eyes, and God, Cyrinda had some nails on her. One of them caught on Steven’s shirt as he tried to lean her up next to her husband, mostly as an excuse to stop smelling all the liquor on her breath, then ripped loose and took half of Steven’s sleeve with it. He jerked his arm away, bracing himself in case some flesh had gotten in there too, and stumbled back a couple of steps to check for blood. Something caught his back and he glanced over his shoulder, saw Joe, and then went back to making sure he still had all his tendons.

“Oh,” Cyrinda said. When Steven looked up, she was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, ankles crossed, twist to her mouth like she’d just had something she didn’t want to pay for. No hearts in her eyes now. “Oh, okay. So I heard about that.”

“You should really get him home,” Joe said, pointing at David, who was still hugging his knees for dear life.

Cyrinda glanced at her husband, then snorted. She turned like she was planning to walk off, but Joe tilted his head or moved his hand, or did something else that expressed his complete disgust with her, so she paused long enough to grudgingly drag David by the arm.

“Probably should’ve called somebody for him,” Steven said. He watched Cyrinda’s ass sway down the hall—parts of that package were pretty damned attractive, no shame in admitting that—then picked at his torn sleeve. “Poor David’ll be lucky if he still has his arm in the morning.”

Joe slouched against the wall, his arm still around Steven’s waist, loose but wrapped there enough to pull Steven with him. “Yeah, well, he doesn’t need that to sing.”

“Love your idea of friends and friendship, honey,” Steven snorted. He finally just shoved what was left of his sleeve up past the elbow, turning around and tucking his head over Joe’s shoulder.

The side of Joe’s mouth pulled back, undecided between a snarl or just a sarcastic smile. Then he shrugged and looked down. “Calling in?” he asked.

Quiet enough to qualify as a whisper. Good enough reason for Steven to lean in closer, rest his forehead against the side of Joe’s jaw. “It got a little weird,” he said. “But I think I’m good now. Why, I miss something?” 

Joe shrugged again, trying to get something out of his pants. He snorted when Steven reached over to help and found out it wasn’t _that_ , then did a one-handed cigarette shake-out and light. Then he leaned back, smoke curling off his nose into Steven’s face. “Nah.” 

He turned his head when Steven swiped the cigarette for a quick drag. The filter tasted off and Steven pulled the cigarette out and looked at it, then over at Joe. 

“That’s why I was walking David out,” Joe said. He paused, watching Steven, his fingers prodding into Steven’s back. If he’d had his guitar on him, he would’ve been jagging the strings, nervous and defensive and mad as hell over both of those. “Some fucking idiot with them kept trying to hand me a drink. Finally tried to shove it up my nose, so I tossed it at his head, and then _we_ were the ones getting kicked out.”

“Nice to know we’re still the life of the party,” Steven said. He twirled the cigarette in his fingers, then poked it at Joe’s mouth. Joe was still staring at him and Steven had to go back and push the end of the cigarette in between Joe’s lips to keep it from falling out. “So, did you swallow or spit? Because—” he nudged Joe, seeing the thunder coming up between those pinched brows “—look, I have to say, I…I’m not holding my breath all the time around Brad’s pot, put it that way. Even if we make him smoke it outside.”

“Well, that’s what the therapist is for, right?” Joe put his head back against the wall. He let the cigarette roll across his bottom lip, then sucked his lips in around it, making the tip flare cherry-red. 

“Don’t judge, motherfucker. I’m just saying, I get tempted. Everybody gets tempted.” Steven’s back was getting cramped. He arched up from the waist, Joe’s arm moving around behind him, taking a second to realize Steven wasn’t actually going anywhere, and then slumped back. Strips of his shredded sleeve fell out from where he’d tucked them around his shoulder and he began pulling at one, seeingif it’d just come off. “I fucking hate talking to them about that, actually.”

Joe glanced over. “But you always call them right off.”

“Well, because I have to talk to fucking somebody and they get paid to be around whenever I need to talk,” Steven muttered. “I guess it’s better than trying to make somebody around here listen, when all they’re really doing is freaking out that I’m gonna fall out in the gutter again and waiting to book me back into rehab. Which is what the therapist does too, but since they’re licensed they’ve got like, a checklist they have to get through first. I’m pretty fucking good at keeping them off the last couple marks at this point.”

“Yeah, we know.” Somebody’s phone went off, right between them so they both looked down. Then Joe grimaced. He pulled his jacket across his belly, then slapped it till the phone stopped. “One of the label suits was asking after mine. I think they figured out I stopped talking to her.”

Steven made a face into Joe’s shoulder, and a note in his head to drop that in Laura’s lap. The last thing they needed was the label starting a fucking turf war with Joe. “It’s just, you get tempted, right? But that’s normal. But everybody acts like that’s not normal, that’s a danger sign, so then you get freaked out over getting tempted, and then you’re freaked out all the time and you practically have to _be_ on something to function.”

“What, are they trying to make you—”

“No. Well, not yet.” Steven stopped picking at his sleeve. “I can tell they’re thinking about it sometimes. One or two of them.”

“That’s a bunch of bullshit,” Joe said, glowering at the far wall. He stabbed his cigarette out and then flicked the butt at a nearby table. “Maybe you need new ones.”

Steven smiled for a second, then sighed. He began fiddling with one of his bracelets. “I just want to tell somebody that hey, I miss it, and they’ll know what I mean, and they’ll know I’m just _saying_ I miss it. And then we can all go back to our regularly scheduled programming.”

Joe snorted and began patting around for his cigarettes again, so Steven figured they were going to move onto their intra-band soap opera, or something like that. “I swallowed a little,” Joe said, and then looked up and looked not so surprised about Steven’s surprise. “Real raw moonshine, so I kind of choked on it, got out of being used to what it feels like going down. Then…yeah, I remembered. But he was a real asshole, and I’m not going to trash all the fucking pain I went through getting clean for _him_ , for fuck’s sake, and anyway, nobody knew where you were.”

“I texted you,” Steven said after a second.

“You said you were in the lobby, and this isn’t the lob—” Joe’s mouth kept moving for another second, easing off irritated and onto pleased. He turned his head towards Steven, shifting his hip back, letting Steven hang off his lower lip like that cigarette had. Then he pulled back, laughing in his throat, his breath rubbing warm and soft against Steven’s jaw. “Hey, if Cyrinda finally got it, then the cat’s out of the bag and we’re fucking dead, aren’t we? Label is going to kill us.”

“And that means we should stop?” Steven said, sliding up to the other man.

Joe sucked in his breath over his teeth. He pulled his hand off Steven’s back, his fingertips just barely touching Steven’s side, and then put it firmly down over Steven’s hip. “No,” he said. “Means we go back to fucking Boston already.”

* * *

They didn’t fuck in the hallway, even if Steven’s shirt was a lost cause by the time they stumbled upstairs. Joe lost his fucking keycard too, so it was a good thing that Steven had swiped Joey’s at some point for a joke and forgotten to give it back. Anyway, from the looks of things, Joey’s latest girlfriend had been pretty dead-set on flashing her designer duds for the style blogs all night long, so it wasn’t like Joey was going to need the bed.

Okay, so they didn’t need it either. Joe backed Steven up against the closet door and skinned off Steven’s pants while Steven was still figuring out which hole in his shirt would get his head out of it. Then he jerked Steven off, pinning Steven back with his mouth on Steven’s throat. Teeth out, not closing down, but there, digging in whenever Steven twisted and bucked. They skidded up and caught the edge of Steven’s jaw when he came, clawing the finish off Joe’s pants so when he put one hand up to press the hair off his face his nails stank of leather.

Once the hair was scraped back, Steven kept pulling his hand till his knuckles hit the wall. He leaned on it, gasping, till Joe finally dragged his head up and looked at him. And then kept looking at him, watching him go all the way down, one hand leaving a damp trail of sweat on the wallpaper, the other one feeling over the zippers and seams of Joe’s coat, sliver of Joe’s shirt, Joe’s pants. Joe didn’t blink till Steven pushed at his hips, needing the room to get onto his knees. Then he closed his eyes, jerking his head down against the wall, his hands closing on Steven’s shoulders so hard that they skipped straight to numb. His mouth was moving, no words, just hissing breath in and out, till suddenly he jerked up, his head knocking into the wall, hands shaking on Steven and begging for help to keep him up. Steven did, but only so he could get the man down the way _he_ wanted, lazy, heavy-lidded, just a hot slack fucking mouth to play with while they both caught their breath.

They eventually got rid of the rest of their clothes. At some point they got a sheet from the bed, and at some point that ended up in a wad in the bathroom, way across from where they finally collapsed, but their clothes managed to stay with them so they were basically nesting down in a clump of rags and sweat and limp limbs. Steven bunched up some of Joe’s hair for a pillow, and fell asleep to Joe picking out chords on his ribs. So that was the end of the tour.

* * *

Joey made Laura get them up for the plane, and Laura roped Ray into carrying them there, basically one under each arm like some giant motherfucker out of a Nordic myth. What Joe’s excuse was, Steven didn’t know, but Steven just wasn’t…awake. Sure, his legs were sort of moving, and he could register that certain people were around, but once his eyes had shut back in that hotel room, it was like his body had decided he had to collect on all those missed hours of sleep right fucking _now_. He didn’t really come to till he got hungry and tried to crawl to the kitchen, only to find himself in another bedroom.

“Steven?” Joe wandered into the doorway, then leaned there, absently flicking at his hair. “What the hell?”

For a moment Steven wasn’t sure if they’d dropped into one of those infinity drawings, on tour so long that they’d finally snapped. Then he saw the hallway behind Joe and sat up. “Where the hell are we?”

“Home?” Joe said. He rubbed at his right eye.

“But this is a…” Steven finally pulled himself to his feet, grimacing as his back and thighs bitched him out. He went to the door and leaned past Joe, confirming that yes, the hallway did go back to a second bedroom. One with a different bedstand in it, and also, there was a third door in between the two, and a staircase. “We’re in a house?”

Joe considered Steven for a few seconds. “You wanna go back to sleep?”

“No.” Steven shoved over the son of a bitch and went out to poke at the stair railing. Then he grabbed it and pulled back, and when it didn’t give, he used it to swing himself around the end and onto the first step. “Joe, it’s a house!”

“Yeah,” Joe agreed, ambling after him. Still pushing at his hair, though then he got his necklace all skewed around and finally had to take it off and put it back on to get it turned the right way. “Yeah, the label rented it, remember? Because you said we’ve got to be all in the same space to get any writing done, but Brad said if he had to listen to us fuck one more time he was going to do all his stuff in an isolation booth.”

“Oh,” Steven said, and thought. Then he shook his head. “Nope, don’t remember, but I don’t care. It’s a house!”

He hopped on down to the first floor, trailing Joe’s sarcastic comments behind him. They had two front rooms and what looked like a porch—it was the middle of the night, apparently—and then a kitchen and a downstairs bathroom and another bedroom, and a basement. A basement with their gear set up. They’d even put his microphone stand in the center.

“Do you really not remember?” Joe finally said behind Steven, sounding annoyed. 

Steven turned around and Joe was annoyed, but also, letting half his mouth smile, and poking at one of his guitars because he thought that that was going to keep Steven from seeing the smiling half. “I have this really fuzzy recollection of an angry conference call telling me to fucking drop a single, like I can just squat and they’ll come out,” he said, flopping down on the floor. He rolled his eyes at Joe’s disgusted snort. “And you told somebody to shove our youtube stats down their fucking throat? And then we just used our break day to cut another video?”

“Yeah, that one.” Joe finally just gave in and lifted the guitar out of its case. He sat down a few feet from Steven, one leg tucked under and the other stretched out for Steven to use as a guide to crawl up there and slap his palm over the strings before Joe could start messing around on undoubtedly fucked tuning. “And there was another one, a couple days later. I mean, we showed you fucking real estate listings. That’s why there’s a fish pool in the back.”

“There’s a fish pool?” Steven pulled back his hand, then shook his head and went back to booting up the laptop somebody had thoughtfully left down here. Tuning app, recording app—he had to let go of Joe’s guitar to plug in a speaker—and then they were set. “Wait. Now you’re fucking with me, Perry, because I’m pretty damn sure I just said I wanted to go fishing.”

“You said you wanted fish,” Joe said. “We got you fucking _fish_.”

He sounded pissed off about it. He was pissed off about it, said his slouched shoulders and tilted head, when Steven looked up and found himself talking to a wall of hair. Still let Steven crawl around him to turn the pegs, since he wouldn’t look at the fucking computer screen himself, but otherwise acting like Steven had just shot his nonexistent dog.

They’d been up all of fifteen minutes. For a moment Steven despaired, and then he shrugged and leaned up against Joe’s back, shoulder first. “Well, if somebody bought bread, I guess I can go feed them the crusts.”

Joe breathed in, then laughed. “That’s _ducks_.”

“Whatever. It’s a house. With a fish pool. And we probably can get ducks too.” Steven snuggled his head into the curve of Joe’s shoulder and neck, listening to the guitar pick up from aimless bending into some actual chords. “I haven’t had a backyard since I left Sunapee.”

“I remember Tom telling me once about going up to your cabin,” Joe said. He let the strings tremble down to silence, which was fine because it was pretty lame, where he’d been going, no energy at all. Then he went into some basic blues progression. “Found you on the porch with one of your sharp suits on, and a whole line of dead squirrels hanging from the roof.”

“Yeah, it was a good dinner that night.” Steven shifted his head up as Joe improvised a chord bridge, then put it back as he recognized the quote. Man had been fucking stealing his iPod, for all that he was always telling Steven he’d just stick it on his own if he actually wanted a song. “We can go fishing too, right? Not in the fucking pool out back, I mean real, proper, waders and creel and bait and tackle shit.”

Joe sped up, moving more into rock territory. “You can go fishing. I didn’t go to rehab so I could stick worms on hooks for you.”

“If you really loved me, you’d _eat_ the worms,” Steven said, and just about dodged Joe’s attempt to elbow him. “Okay, fine, asshole. You can just cook the fucking thing.”

Whatever Joe thought about that, it wasn’t important enough for him to say it, and anyway, he was finally getting somewhere with his noodling around. He moved his head a little towards Steven when Steven pushed his chin over Joe’s shoulder, acknowledging Steven’s interest, and kept on with it.

“Needs to get tightened up, but that—no, _that_. That.” Steven prodded Joe’s hip. “That one. Do that one again.”

Joe started to tell Steven to just hit the fucking playback, then stopped and stared at his hands. He redid the riff, not quite the same, because he could fucking remember what Steven had snapped at him five months ago but when it came to composing, he couldn’t even get muscle memory to work for him, but Steven kind of liked the difference. When Joe tried it out a third time, third variation, Steven hooked one arm over the other man and took over some of the fretwork.

“That was cool,” Joe said. But he didn’t know how to end the damn lick, and after some misfiring chords he just gave up and dropped his hands into his lap. “Fuck it. I still feel like I should be crawling into a hole somewhere.”

“But we’ve got a house,” Steven said plaintively. He smiled up at Joe’s arched brow, then scooted his ass back till he could lie down. His head started out against Joe’s hip, but the other man moved the guitar and of course Steven was taking up that offer, so it ended up in Joe’s lap, with Steven’s nose just shy of the back of the guitar. “So we’re gonna go fishing. And hey, when does everyone else show up?”

“Two weeks. Tom and Brad, anyway. You’d know about Joey.” Joe pursed his lips, then shook his head, not going with the argument this time. He turned the guitar a little more, and Steven draped his arm over Joe’s knee, so he laid it down on Steven’s elbow so he could do some slide. “Yes, Steven, we can fuck in every room, but then you’re dealing with them.”

Steven rolled his eyes. “Whatever, we’ll get somebody to steam-clean everything before they show up. Joey’s off with his girl, checking out her family, but he’ll be in driving distance next week. He’s got a place, but it’s with her, so…you know, probably going to want a day off from that. And I think Ray said Don and couple other people I know are around.”

“Don?” Joe cocked his head. “Isn’t he the guy you threw out so I could move in?”

“Way to rewrite history, Perry,” Steven muttered. He got tired of having the guitar on his arm, so he pulled it out, ignoring Joe’s irritated grunt, and twisted over so he was pressing his face into Joe’s belly. “Anyway, I think he might finally be over the whole thing with the ash-tray. He was a good guy, just not that into band life.”

“Okay,” Joe said.

He was into his playing enough now to bat at Steven’s head when Steven pushed his face a little more into Joe’s stomach, mouthing through the man’s worn-ass t-shirt. Steven shook him off, then pushed back the hair he’d knocked into Steven’s eyes. “Might be nice to have some hospitality practice for your mother,” he said. “I mean, I’m not sure I remember what it’s like to have a dishwasher.”

Joe stopped playing and looked straight down at Steven. His mouth moved, and then he looked up and away, smiling a little. Kind of amused, kind of surprised. He put his hand on Steven’s shoulder for a moment, then moved it back to the guitar.

“Yeah, I fucking remember what you say, asshole,” Steven said. He arched his back, working out a persistent kink, and then rolled his head back into Joe’s stomach. “Since I know she likes me, and she knows she likes me, but you get so fucking uptight every time.”

“Because she’s my mom.” Joe quirked a brow at Steven. “It’s not a normal reaction to meet your kid’s fucking boyfriend for the first time and ask them whether American or English rehab’s better, and then offer them pie.”

“Are you insulting my mother?”

There was an eye-flick. Just Joe sliding his eyes over, not _quite_ a full roll, but not quite trying to hide anything either. “I love your mother, Steven,” he said. “But she’s not _my_ mother.”

“Yeah, true, nobody’s my mother but her.” Steven let his neck loll against Joe’s leg, keeping half an ear to Joe’s playing. “We could get pie. And make Don eat it first, so we know it’s good.”

“You can have over whoever you want, Steven,” Joe sighed. His arm was drooping closer and closer to just lying across Steven’s chest. “I’m just not gonna promise that I’ll put on a fucking apron and a smile.”

“Well, there goes that Christmas present idea,” Steven muttered. He offered Joe a stunning smile, when Joe ignored in favor of glaring at him, and then pulled his head out from under Joe’s arm. “You can go hide out back with the fish if you want, but then you can’t spy on us and make sure Don’s not putting any moves on me.”

If Joe had had a cigarette, he would’ve blown a lungful of smoke into Steven’s face. As it was, he had to settle for just putting his guitar to the side in a vaguely offended manner. “Look, they’re your friends. It doesn’t transfer just because we’re fucking, you know. And I’m not really a fake it and grin guy.”

“Yes, Joe, I picked up on that way back when you got me to break my hand on our first date,” Steven drawled. He blinked, seeing the way that cut Joe, and sat on his hand because his first impulse was to smack the man and that was just going to end up with severed body parts. “I’m just saying, you could meet them before you get pissed off at them.”

“I’ve met a couple,” Joe said, looking away. He grabbed his guitar by the neck, hesitated, and then pushed it further to the side. “Didn’t make much of a difference.”

Steven bit down on his impulses again. Had to rock his weight on his hand for a couple moments, because God, sometimes he wondered whether Joe was human or was just a walking, talking switchblade. “Joey would agree with that.”

“Joey’s never fucking gotten over that broken hand,” Joe snapped. He looked back at Steven, then dropped his head to drag his hair back from his face with both hands. Held that for a second, then yanked his hands out and went over backwards, sprawling out to stare at the ceiling. “Fucking rich, you know? Asking if we’re friends, and then acting like every time I get upset, I’m going to beat the shit out of you. Which wasn’t even what happened that time.”

“I don’t remember that,” Steven said. “I mean, Joey saying that. I know what happened with my hand, asshole, since I was the sober one back then.”

Joe just grunted, and then jerked his leg when Steven grabbed it, not trying to just get it away from Steven. Then he just put it down and pretended like Steven wasn’t there, even when Steven had gotten up by his head and was hanging over it. He just looked straight through Steven’s forehead.

“Did he really say that?” Steven asked.

“He doesn’t have to,” Joe finally mumbled. He tried to move his head, but gave up on that when Steven shuffled over there. “Jesus Christ. You don’t think I have fucking issues with what happened there? Your fucking fingers were all bent wrong, and—you scared me into fucking rehab.”

“Well, we never talked about it.” Steven pulled up his knee and rested his chin on it. “Never talked about what the fuck you and Tom and Joey talked about while I was out, either. Aside from you having to walk me to the clinic, and well, looking back, that didn’t seem like much of a problem for you.”

Joe snorted. “Yeah, fine, the escort service wasn’t hard, but Joey didn’t tell you? I thought you were buddies.”

“We are, but in case you didn’t notice, Joey’s a fucking asshole too, and I’m not his fucking therapist either,” Steven said. He let his hand slide down his shin to lie on his foot, fingertips just a flex away from Joe’s ear. “All he says is that he told you to stop fucking with me. He’s a lot like you that way, doesn’t think details matter.”

“He said he’d nail me into a barrel and toss me in the harbor, because yeah, you _can_ get talked into that sort of shit at the drop of a hat and that’s exactly why he was going to watch my ass, in case I ever did that again,” Joe said. Still raw, but not as angry. He wasn’t looking through Steven now so much as looking at somebody else. “Better than Tom, I guess. He went—he went on this long rant about how I’d fucked them up once, and he knew I was coming in to fuck things up again, but it was different, because it was you and you will fuck right back, and the only thing was the band needed at least one of us, so he’d help _you_ out.”

Steven sat up and put his arms down behind him. Then he pulled them back and rolled onto one hip. Bumped Joe’s arm when he was sliding his legs out, and Joe looked over and frowned but didn’t move, so Steven put his head down on the other man’s chest.

“I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or whether I should be trying to kill them now,” Steven said. He shifted his elbow so it wasn’t pressed so hard into Joe’s side. “Makes me sound like a bunny-boiler.”

“I wasn’t trying to make you mad, you know?” Joe twisted his arm, the one under Steven. Then stopped pulling at that one, just when Steven was going to get up to let it out, and brought his other one around to lie against the back of Steven’s head. “I was _drunk_. And fucking frustrated, because God, Steven, I was practically tap-dancing for you, and you just…kept running off to fuck some chick, or to sell off another song _we_ should’ve been playing, or whatever the hell was bright and shiny that day. How was I supposed to know you’d actually fucking listen to me that one fucking time?”

Steven started to answer, then just pulled up his hand so they both could look at it. He still had a couple scars on the knuckles and he touched one with his thumb, and over his hand he could see Joe’s eyes fixing right on that. Then he splayed out his fingers. Flexed them a couple times before he let them drop to Joe’s chest.

“Look, I’m not saying it was your fault—” Joe said.

“I never broke a bone for somebody before,” Steven said quietly. “Or broke anything, actually. I’ve broken a whole lot of shit, but that was all just for me. It’s kind of special, if you think about it.”

“I don’t really want to think about it that way,” Joe muttered after a moment. “This is where we start calling you crazy.”

“Yeah, yeah, spent a month of therapy just on that one. You know.”

Joe snorted. He was sort of playing with Steven’s hair, moving his fingers around in circles in it. “Two and a half sessions.” He flicked one finger at the back of Steven’s head, then pressed his palm over the place when Steven hit his shoulder. “Me, you egotistical bastard. I did go to those for a while. It’s not like I just sat there on the couch for an hour a week.”

“Well, it’s you, so I’m not gonna assume,” Steven said. Then he moved his head, getting off his ear because it was going numb. It was a little chilly down in the basement, but not so much that he felt it was worth getting up before he fell asleep again. “So we can have Joey over so he and I can yell at each other?”

“Just you?”

“You can have a turn if you want, but I call dibs since I’ve known him longer. And having thought about it, great that he cares about me, less great that he thinks I’m some weak-brained lunatic. You got me fucking mad, you didn’t fucking hypnotize me. There’s a difference.” Steven closed his eyes, then reluctantly opened them. “You can send out Tom’s invite. Your fucking bassist.”

Joe laughed. “All right, asshole,” he said. “All right. I can live with that.”

* * *

As it turned out, they got in a hell of a lot of practice. Don and Ray both came by to shoot the shit and look at the fish, and make Joe act like he wasn’t hanging around just to catch never-before-recounted anecdotes of Steven’s younger days. It amused Ray to no end, and he took to just making up starts to really, really over-the-top adventures and then getting too “distracted” to finish. Which gave Steven a hard time later on, when he had to persuade Joe that no, he really had never gotten _that_ experimental with various kitchen implements.

“Hey, I like him these days,” was Ray’s defense. “He’s a touchy, possessive, eavesdropping son of a bitch who keeps you too fucked to get out and do anything stupid. I’m just encouraging that.”

Notwithstanding his jackassery, Ray was kind enough to give them a lift, since the label would get them a house but wouldn’t get them a car, and while their bank accounts were looking a hell of a lot better these days, their credit scores still had big blinking warning lights posted up around them. He drove them around town a couple nights, catching up on the Boston scene at various friends’ parties, right up till they got attacked by a screaming pack of fangirls and nearly rammed the car into a fountain trying to get away. After that, Ray held out for danger pay, and Joe told him to fuck off till they put together another tour.

“And they were doing so well,” Steven sighed, stirring the straw around in his lemonade. “I really thought they were going to bond, you know?

Laura laughed at him, propping her feet up on the porch railing. She had gone off the radar for half a week, coming back about five shades darker and two days early, claiming she’d missed the adrenaline of freaking out over them. “Joe did tell him to come back, just not right away. I’d consider that a big step forward in their relationship. Anyway, so the fishing didn’t happen?”

“No, it’s happening. This weekend.” The porch hadn’t come with a swing, so Steven had bought one off eBay and then had gotten Ray to put it up for them before he and Joe had had their fight. Nice woodwork, had a very spare colonial look, but it needed cushions. He shifted from buttock to buttock, then just twisted himself over so he was lying on his back, his head on Laura’s lap and his legs hanging off the end. “We got this cabin up by the Barn, and Joe _said_ he’d figure out the car.”

Laura frowned. “What are you going to do, hire a driver? Because I told you two, we checked every which way and he’s just got to retake the test. He can’t just revive his old one. It’s been too long. And you’re permanently banned from holding a license.”

“Get busted for pot one time,” Steven muttered.

“Pot, cocaine, public indecency, disorderly conduct and attempted solicitation,” Laura promptly reeled off.

Steven pushed himself up on his arm and shook his finger at her. “They _dropped_ the solicitation charge, thank you, because just wearing lipstick and fake eyelashes isn’t a crime.” He drank some lemonade while he was up, then flopped back. “And the cop told me to get out, so I got out. If I thought he’d be all right with me grabbing my pants first, I would have and I would have been perfectly decent.”

Giggling, Laura pushed her hand back through her hair, then let her arm come down to lie across the back of the swing. She sipped at her iced tea and watched the fish swirl around the pond. “Well, I’m technically still on vacation, so I’m not going to worry about it.”

“I think maybe we’re driving up with his mom,” Steven said. “She hasn’t been back there in a couple years, since his dad died and she decided she’d rather head out west than put up with New England bullshit winters.”

“Where are they, anyway?” Laura said, looking around. “I nearly had a heart attack when I realized Joe was actually going to leave you alone with a girl.”

Steven pressed his lips together, then got back up to sitting and sucked down the rest of his lemonade. He knew she was kidding, but—she wasn’t really kidding, same as everyone else. And he had that perverse streak, just not wanting to put up with what everybody _thought_ he was when really, he still liked women just fine. Liked looking at them, liked appreciating them, liked flirting with them.

“Fucking some bitch just to prove you’ve still got it would be stupid as hell,” Laura said, watching him.

“Okay, you don’t get to hear about my sessions anymore.” Then Steven slid down till he could hang his head over the back of the swing. He scuffed his foot along the porch, then handed his glass to Laura and just pulled up both legs underneath himself, gripping his shins. “Eighteen _months_.”

Laura snorted, then put her arm around his shoulders and hugged him. Then she got up just long enough to set their glasses on the rail. “Honestly, it’s more about him than you,” she said, sitting back down.

“Well, no, I mean, I fucked around on everybody else I ever hooked up with, so it’s at least a fair question,” Steven said. He pulled his head off the swing, then sighed and slumped down, letting his elbows rest on his thighs. “It’s just a…a question. Even for me. I mean, not that I would ever decline you and some bodacious beauty in a tub of whipped cream—”

“Hey, like I keep telling you, not till I get you in handcuffs and feathers.”

“—or a threesome either,” Steven went on, glaring at her, because she knew damn well that that wouldn’t have a chance in hell unless she stopped insisting on being the one with the key. “But I just think about it, right? And fine, watch porn, but he peeks at that shit all the time. And it’s just very weird, and even weirder because I don’t even think about how weird it is till somebody reminds me.”

She grinned at him, then let Steven borrow her shoulder for a couple of minutes. Put her arm up to wrap around his head and stuck one leg out to make the swing sway a little. She didn’t move her fingers as much as Joe did, not constantly flicking Steven’s hair or feeling out invisible strings.

“So how’s having sex with his mother around?” Laura asked.

Steven’s breathing went off-beat. He coughed, choked again, and had to sit up straight so he could press his diaphragm back into the right rhythm. “We put her in the downstairs room,” he finally managed to gasp. “Jesus, Laura. I was trying really, really hard not to think about that. Now what am I supposed to do?”

“Let Joe talk you into it?”

“That’d work, actually,” Steven said after a moment’s thought. “It really hasn’t put him off at _all_.”

“I’d like to see what would. Much as I like you two, there were times this tour when you came off the stage and I wouldn’t have touched you without a full haz-mat suit.” Laura gave him a pat on the shoulder, as if she really meant her consoling tone. “I do love you, Steven. But ew.”

“Should’ve seen me in my druggie days,” Steven snorted.

Laura doubled up her disgusted face, then waved a dismissive hand as she settled back on the swing. “Oh, I know, I’ve seen those Facebook galleries. Glad we finally gave up on trying to untag all those, by the way, because I hear we couldn’t even get interns to stay on the job.”

“Yeah, well, I always thought it was stupid anyway. That shit happened, it’s not like I ever lied about it, and anyway, we’re not getting marketed as some squeaky-clean boy band, so I don’t see how it was going to hurt us. It’s not us _now_ , it’s us then, and hell, anybody worth knowing’s going to have a crazy past.” Steven leaned way over, almost sliding off his crossed legs, and pushed off the porch with his fingertips to set the swing going again. Then he pulled himself back up, grabbing the swing chains for support. “Therapist one thought it was shitty for my recovery process too.”

“Well, good, because sometimes I do wonder if your shrinks have enough balls to take you on against the label,” Laura muttered. She paused, checking her nails like she did when she had to go somewhere uncomfortable, and then took a deep breath. “Speaking of, they might be freaking out over you and Joe.”

Steven glanced heavenward for patience and compassion and tolerance. “Which one is this?”

“The one where you two can get all grabby and flirty, but no more than that, because they think that that’s gonna make you less attractive to that critical mainstream teenage girl demographic,” Laura said. “Even though eighty percent of your fan videos are dedicated to Steven and Joe forever, sparkly hearts. Not to mention ten or so doujinshi series, of which one’s up to twelve installments.”

“Doujinshi?”

“Show you later.” Laura snickered and had to rub her mouth to make herself serious again. “If I’d known that Joe was going to be out with his mother, I would’ve brought them with me. Anyway, it’s not at crisis point yet, but basically, everybody in the industry knows, and they’d just waiting for some idiot fan to finally get it so they can come crawling out of the woodwork with their tabloid exclusives.”

“Fuck that, we’ll just do a press conference,” Steven said, slouching down. “It’ll go like this: I say hi, Joe scowls, and then we do it on the table.”

He knew she was looking at him and knew how she was looking at him, and he didn’t want to deal with that. Not right away. But she kept looking at him and finally he had to get up and just get moving. Get going, get away from all of that bullshit, just get ahead of it and do what he actually wanted instead of getting stuck.

Steven got as far as the fish pool. The koi came over, hoping for food, and then just sat there, popping their little round mouths at them. Fish in reality were a little less…interactive than he really would’ve liked.

“So I know you guys made this decision and I’ve been trying to respect that, but at this point I’d be a shitty friend, much less publicist, if I didn’t ask whether you do have an actual response plan,” Laura said. She’d ducked back inside to refill their glasses and handed Steven his when he looked at her. Then she sucked at her iced tea, watching the fish. “Haven’t talked to the other guys yet, by the way.”

“Don’t mention that, it’ll just start up another war.” Steven put his finger over the end of the straw, pulled it out of the glass and held it over the pool, and then lifted his finger so a spurt of lemonade hit the water. The koi arrowed in on the spot, pushing and shoving mindlessly at each other. A lot like the music business, he thought, sticking his straw back into his glass. “Well, look, what happened was, fucking label was dragging out contract negotiations and they wanted to put in all these cover your ass clauses because we were high-risk blah blah blah and they didn’t want to get stuck paying for rehab just so we could deliver on our end again. And Peter was pushing for us to just give in and fucking sign already.”

Laura dug her toes into the edge of the pool. “This a good time to say that I’m really glad you guys finally ditched him?”

“Peter wasn’t that bad,” Steven sighed. He prodded at the ice in his lemonade with his finger. “They’re all sharks, all of them, and for a shark he was pretty open about it, at least. I picked that up when I was down to writing for other people. They make nice to the talent, but songwriters are staff, more or less, so they’ll drop all the masks around you. Learned a lot listening to them. Mostly, about just how many types of assholes there are in the world.”

“I think the other guys appreciate that too, you know,” Laura said. She nudged him with her elbow. “I know you had a huge blow-up over picking your current shark, but you made them actually care about it this time.”

“You should’ve heard Joe about it afterward, and then now he’s always trying to one-up me on grilling them.” One ice cube flipped over Steven’s fingernail and he grabbed at it, but it squirted away from him and went into the pool. And once again, the stupid fish went for it. “Anyway, so we were fucking tired and then they brought in this marketing bastard, and he was going on and on about mainstream appeal. It took something like ten minutes for us to figure out what he really meant, and then another ten for Joe to calm down.”

Laura raised her brows. “You weren’t upset?”

“I was, but later, when I had time—I was more in shock, I guess. I mean, nobody’s ever given a shit who I was fucking before. Granted, that was because half the time, I pretty much had no _idea_ who I was doing. Or if I was actually doing anything.” Steven grimaced into his lemonade. “Drugs really, really are not great for your sexual performance.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” Laura drawled.

“The other guys weren’t big on it either,” Steven added after a second. He rocked back on his heels, grinning at the memory. “I remember Tom looking over, doing his manic professor eyes, and going, ‘well, if they can’t fuck, then how are we supposed to write your fucking albums?’ But finally they talked us into just not _affirmatively_ saying anything, till we got out there and got a little established, so nobody would pigeonhole us. And we were all really worried about that. That’s what happened last time.”

Nodding, Laura looked down into the pool. She moved her straw to the side of her mouth to get the glass out of the way, apparently taking a liking to a really big, black-splotched, persistent bastard who wouldn’t give up on the idea that they had food. “Okay. Well, so _Rolling Stone_ came courting this time. Now what?”

“I guess try and talk about it,” Steven said reluctantly. “That’s what we usually do.”

* * *

_PERRY: Steven and I weren’t really arguing at that point. We both had the same basic goals. But I have to admit that I had days where I still thought I was being screwed over. Steven always has about fifty things going at once and it can be hard to tell what he’s really focused on._  
_WHITFORD: Joe’s values are very traditional. So are Steven’s, even if Steven does put on more of a show, if you will. The rest of us had known it was coming for a long time._  
_TYLER: So what happened was, I asked first. Because I’m not the only really fucking dense one in the band._  


*We can’t just call each other assholes and go play a gig?* Joey said. His mouth kept moving for several more seconds as the damn wireless began cutting out again. *That’s what we usually do.*

Steven heard the door open behind him and glanced over his shoulder, then took his finger away from the ‘mute’ button when he saw it was just Joe. “Real fucking constructive, Kramer. Everything all right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Joe said, sitting down next to Steven. “Dropped her off so we can fight.”

*Who?* Joey said.

“His mom. She just flew out so she doesn’t have to put up with our ability to fuck victory into defeat,” Steven muttered, shoving the laptop over to Joe. He slumped back into the sofa, groping around on his other side till he got one of the cute embroidered throw pillows and could start picking out the stitches. “Jesus F. Christ. Look, you want to just stick your head in the sand, fine, Joey, but then you don’t get to say a fucking word about whatever we end up doing about it.”

Joey threw up his hands, all ready to lay into Steven, and then started barking. He frowned and the barking kept going, and then finally he turned around and yelled for his girlfriend to take out the damn dog. *That’s not what I—*

“You got a dog?” Steven said, pushing the pillow into his lap. He pulled one leg up, tucking that foot under his thigh.

*Yeah, a great Dane. You’re gonna love him.* Then Joey shook his head, pressing his fingers against his twitchy eye. *Okay, goddamn it, I did not say—what I said back then, and what I’m still saying now, is I don’t give a shit that you two _fuck_. What I do give a shit about is that you two fuck on my bed, and then get up and fight in my bathroom, and then start fucking again in my shower—*

“That was Brad’s shower,” Joe said. Pretty mildly for him.

Joey rolled his eyes. *Whatever. If I see your naked ass, I think it counts as my trauma too. Anyway, I don’t have a problem with it, so…whatever you want to do. But it’s really what you’re going to do, all right? Because you’re the ones who’ll have to deal with it. I don’t know what to say besides that.*

Steven heard Joe start to say something to that and he couldn’t tell from Joe’s face where it was going to be on the sarcastic to graphic violence scale, so he elbowed the other man. Then he hung himself over Joe’s shoulder before Joe could get his arm out to shove him. “Yeah, I did notice that, Joey.”

*Well, then why are you calling?* Joey asked.

“Because we’re trying to keep people involved. It is a band,” Joe said. Still mostly eyeing Steven, like he was readjusting his priority targets, but he gave Joey a sharp look when the other man snorted. “What?”

Joey blinked hard, like he hadn’t expected to get caught. On video chat. With Steven’s quick fingers on the screenshot button. *Nothing.*

“What?” Joe repeated, with more emphasis on not accepting bullshit. He almost looked over when Steven leaned harder on him, but finally opted to keep his eyes laser-locked to Joey.

After a couple squirms, his old insecure streak bubbling up, Joey just sat back and jutted out his chin and went with belligerent motherfucker. *Just a little weird to see you taking an interest in us outsiders.*

“You’re in the fucking band, Joey. The point’s to just get that fucking straight first, and if that means not being friends works better, well, I’ll be that fucking hardass because I give a shit—”

*I work my fucking ass off, and that fucking ass has been around longer than yours, so maybe you shouldn’t act like you’ve been running this—*

“My hand’s fine,” Steven blurted out. He could get Joey giving him a blank look, but from Joe it was just precious. He blew a raspberry at the other man, then ducked into Joe’s hair so he’d take Joe’s smack on the shoulder instead of the head. Joe twisted around a couple times, thinking about another try, then gave up; Steven waited another five seconds before he risked a peek out again.

Joey was staring at them, like he had about three-fourths of a puzzle put together but had gone to get the last pieces and had found out they were made of green cheese. He rubbed his hand over the side of his face, then put it down and pulled himself up straight. *I don’t even want to ask,* he muttered.

“I fucking _care_ ,” Joe snapped. “And you know what, I don’t have to prove that to you.”

*Nobody’s saying that you have to.* Then Joey tipped his head back and let out a long sigh. *Joe. We all get that you’re here to take this band as far as it’s going to go. We get it. You came all the way from England and moved in with Steven and got him through his voice-less period, and—*

“I don’t think—” Steven started.

“What the hell is your problem?” Joe said. He pushed himself back so sharply that Steven slid off his shoulder and almost nose-dived into his lap. Then he stared down at Steven, pissed about that, not offering a finger to get Steven back upright. “Honestly. What?”

Joey glanced at Steven, then pushed up like he was going to leave. Then he put his arms down. Another look at Steven, and then he was dropping his head into his hands, tired, angry, already regretting whatever he was about to say. Not that he wasn’t going to say it anyway, but that was Joey’s problem, thinking an extra helping of guilt was going to make it better. *Look, if that surgery hadn’t worked out, or if you’d just fucking creeped out Steven, or—I don’t know, if Steven wasn’t even around, would you even be here?*

“That’s a stupid question.” Joe stared at the laptop for a couple seconds, slouched back, hands clenched on his knees. Then he pulled himself forward. He looked at the floor, fidgeting with one of his bracelets, then looked up. “I’m not deranged, Joey. If Steven hadn’t been interested, I wouldn’t have kept trying.”

Steven and Joey both raised their hands.

“You didn’t say you _weren’t_ interested,” Joe snorted, glancing at Steven. “And for all I could tell, you were flirting a lot. If you’d just told me to get out, I would have left.”

*Yeah, true, he was,* Joey said, and flipped off Steven’s glare.

“And for the other…well, if Steven wasn’t here, no, I wouldn’t be here either. But you wouldn’t be here, so I don’t see how that matters. Maybe we would’ve ended up knowing each other but we wouldn’t—it wouldn’t be like this,” Joe said slowly. “And I still wouldn’t fall for _you_.”

Joey laughed, short and sarcastic. *Not what I was asking, thanks.* Then he slid to the side of his chair and leaned on the arm. *Okay, but—*

“You missed one,” Steven said.

“I didn’t,” Joe said. He looked over at Steven, still hunched on his knees, then dipped his head. Grinning for some damn reason, like the arrogant son of a bitch he was, just knowing it was going to work out. “Goes with you not being interested.”

Steven could feel Joey shifting around, wishing he was anywhere else, and didn’t give a fuck. The man wanted a closer relationship with both of them, well, he’d have to get close to this too. “Yeah, because you never fucking thought it wouldn’t _not_ work out.”

“Look, even if it had—just hypothetically, okay, well, you weren’t my fucking soulmate when I saw that video,” Joe said. “I noticed the voice, but I fucking ended up living with _you_. Jesus, Steven, do I keep fucking asking you why you ended up with me?”

“That’s because of your ego, Joe fuckin’ Perry,” Steven muttered.

Joe pressed the grin out of his lips. He moved back a little, then snorted and ran his hand back through his hair like he didn’t give a shit, even if his eyes were wide open and raw all the way down.

*Anyway, do either of you really _care_?* Joey asked. When they looked at him, he was pained as hell but he forged on anyway, and that was the flipside of Joey Kramer’s inability to do anything but say what he meant and mean what he said. *Fine, it’s about the band, but are you worried that you’re going to screw over the band? Is that why we’re having fucking awkward Skype calls? Because the point I was trying to make was that—that I think that the band is us being a fucking mess and we can’t be anything else than what we are. And _I_ think that includes you driving the rest of us nuts arguing and screwing, and arguing while screwing, but sometimes I just don’t know if that’s how you see it.*

“That’s a pretty good point,” Steven finally said.

Joey exaggerated his sigh of relief to epically comic proportions. *Great, because Jesus, I thought this is why we pay your fucking shrinks. Why are we making me do their job?*

“Thanks, Joey,” Joe said quietly. He paused, looking at his fidgeting hands. “Look, while you’re on, Steven said you’re in town next week.”

“Oh, right.” Steven got the pillow back and started picking at it again. “You want to come over?”

*For round two?* Joey asked warily. *Look, maybe I was kind of—anyway, when I asked, I didn’t mean we had to be best fucking buddies. I just want to get along. Sure, the show doesn’t suffer, but we spend most of the time off the damn stage.*

Joe looked up long enough to give Joey a tight smile. “No, really, if you want to come over and see the place, come over. Walk the dog in the backyard.”

“We’ve got fish,” Steven said. “Dumb as hell. He wants to eat them, he can help himself.”

Joey laughed, almost throwing off the edgy eyes. *I’ll check with Nina. And look, you—do anything about this thing, just text me or something first, okay? So I know when to expect the angry phone calls from the label.*

“Yeah, sure,” Joe said. Then they said their good-nights and Joe ended the call, and put the top of the laptop down while he was at it. He sat there with his arm out for a moment, then got up.

“Not really how I was thinking we’d do that,” Steven muttered. Then he frowned and twisted around. “Where are you going?”

Joe didn’t answer. Just kept walking. He went into the kitchen, banged around in there for a while—Steven had some emails he needed to answer, so he opened up the laptop again—and then came back in, but just on his way to the bedroom. He slowed down when he heard Steven get up, but didn’t turn around.

The bedroom was another way station. The silent motherfucker went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth or rearranged Steven’s nail polish bottles or something like that, and then came back out and looked at Steven, who had sat down on the side of the bed. He pulled off his shirt and tossed that over a chair, then grabbed one of the bedposts for balance while he took off his jeans and socks. Clothes done, he got under the blankets and turned on his side, like he was going to sleep any time soon.

He shifted over when Steven laid down at his back, on top of the blankets. Steven lifted his arm over the other man, then pulled it back and tucked it in against his chest. It was pretty warm in the room and he could sleep in his clothes fine if he had to, and so far Joe wasn’t giving him a reason to get rid of them. He stayed put, and Joe stayed on his side.

* * *

It got colder later in the night, to the point that Steven woke up. Slow, muzzy, lying there for a while wondering what the hell was wrong. Finally he got up and took a piss, and when he came back, a draft flicked across his back and made him shiver as he put his hands down on the bed.

Joe had flipped onto his other side while Steven was in the bathroom. At first Steven thought he was still asleep, but then he moved his arm under the blanket. Steven looked at him—too dark to see his face—and then pushed up the sheets and got under them. If Joe wanted to toss him out, fine, they’d wrestle over the blankets then, but in the meantime Steven wasn’t going to be a martyr to fear.

He slid in on his back and his leg knocked into Joe right away. Joe moved away from it, which Steven ignored as he got up on one arm to pull up the sheets, but then came back to just curl around Steven’s side, following the line of Steven’s body but staying just short of it. Steven stared up at the ceiling for a second, awkward and stiff, and then gave that a mental fuck-you too and let himself sprawl out. It took about two minutes for them to migrate into their usual haphazard tangle, and then another for Steven to drift off again, Joe smashing one of his arms, tendrils of Joe’s hair trying to poke into his mouth, warm and comfortable.

* * *

The next morning, Steven got up early and went out to the lake. It was cool and there were strips of mist over the water, bending the light so it looked like somebody had floated paper lanterns all over the place. No other people were around so he heard the ripples and the birds and the whoosh of the breeze through the weeds, and everything was just lacing together, the sound and the silence both. He’d hated not being able to talk, but in a place like this, he could almost see the good points of that.

He came back with a couple trout. Joe was up at that point and he stood on the porch and smoked while Steven gutted them on the steps. “So I called Tom and Brad,” he said when Steven was halfway through the last one. “When do you want to talk to them?”

“You found Brad?” Steven flicked some fish guts off his knife, then used the crook of his wrist to slide the garden hose off his knee and get its end into the slit fish belly.

“Laura,” Joe said. He finished off his cigarette and then reached over to pick up the first fish. “Do you want to talk to them?”

Once the fish was cleaned out, Steven rinsed off his hands. He didn’t have soap out here so he used the edge of the step to scrape off his fingers. “Joe, what are we doing?”

Joe looked at him, then stooped and got the other fish. He carried both of them back into the kitchen, and when Steven got inside a few minutes later, he was wrapping them up in some paper towels. He stuck them in the fridge and then came back to run his hands under the tap that Steven was using to soap off his hands.

“My mother said something before she left,” Joe said, so Steven couldn’t get in a protest. He got at the dish-towel first too. “Just…that I don’t look too happy in any of our official promo photos. And with everything we’ve gone through, I should at least get some taken where I do.”

“I talked to my mom too. Earlier.” Steven flipped off most of the water, then rubbed the rest away on his pants. He gave his fingers a sniff, decided the fishy smell was too weak to matter, and leaned against the counter. “So _she_ says, we still need to get a priest. Doesn’t matter what religion, or what else we do, but we should have one.”

Joe stared down at the towel stuffed into his left hand. “What?”

“But she thinks that a peacock-feather train would be amazing,” Steven added. He spotted a nick in one of his nails, probably from when he was pulling the fish off the hook, and began scratching at the edges, trying to smooth them out. “Joe Perry, I love you and I’d like to spend the rest of my life writing fucking great songs with you and annoying the fucking shit out of you. Marry me.”

Joe looked up. His eyes hadn’t gone that wide since they’d first met. Then Steven could see the son of a bitch pulling back, shoulders down, mouth twisting up in a sneer, eyes half-shutting because sarcasm meant you didn’t give enough of a shit to give somebody your full attention.

“I don’t have a ring because I didn’t think I was going to have to fucking do it, but I should’ve known since you never even managed to ask me out once,” Steven said. “But I was talking to Mom and she’s starting to wonder whether you really care, because if we’re going to fucking be out there, we’d better mean it. And I ended up with you because you were a temperamental fucking stalker with an ego as big as mine, but I love that and I love you and we are having fucking feathers.”

“No,” Joe said.

Steven put his hand down on where he thought the counter was, and it wasn’t there. He was already leaning against it but he managed to stumble anyway. “No?”

“We’re getting married, but I’m not wearing feathers,” Joe said. He blinked, his eyes still wide, like he had just walked in and heard himself, and then he shook his head. His mouth was starting to stretch out into a smile, one of those brilliant curves like somebody had sliced off a piece of the full moon.

Steven hit him. Joe grabbed Steven’s arm and pushed it down and kissed the hell out of Steven, which…made up for it. And then kept kissing Steven, which made Steven less grudging about admitting that, and _then_ slid his hands into Steven’s pants, which just made Steven give up on thinking about it completely.

* * *

Brad was a phone call. Not even a video call, just regular old phone because he’d vamoosed somewhere without wireless and computers and basically, just wanted them to fill him in so he could tell them fine and to just let him know when to show up. Joe actually got irritated enough to point out that _everybody_ was going to get a lot of shit for this.

*I’m not stupid, Joe,* Brad said. *Yeah, there’ll be a bunch of horseshit flying around. But there’s already a bunch of horseshit flying around, so the only real difference I’m seeing is that you and Steven aren’t going to be throwing it at each other. At least, not as much. I’ll take that.*

“You’re never even around for it,” Joe said. He didn’t really want to be that much of a fucking asshole, with the limp tone and the hands twitching for a guitar, but he just didn’t know what else to do.

The audible equivalent of an eye-roll came down the line. *And it’d be nice if I didn’t have to take off running after every show to keep out of it. So just stop ragging on each other about who’s more crazy in love, because Jesus, who honestly cares? Can’t you two just fight about the music?*

Joe opened his mouth, then closed it. He stared at the phone. Moved his shoulder when Steven put his chin on it, rolling it to get comfortable, and then shrugged and looked at Steven.

“So anyway, thanks for the blessing, and remember to check out our gift wish-list on Amazon,” Steven finally said. And that, plus some swearing and shoulder-shoving and Joe eventually seeing the benefits of another truckload of guitars he wouldn’t have to pay for, was it for Brad.

Steven texted Joey. He texted back that they couldn’t fucking wait till the next tour, damn it, because they’d just lost him two hundred dollars to Ray, and then ignored every single text, email, voicemail, and conceivable social media messaging service that Steven tried after that. If he _didn’t_ come over when they were back in Boston, Steven was going to hunt him down and mount him on the lead trailer.

Ray texted _Steven_. It consisted of one hundred and fifty smirking emoticons. And then he bought Joe a fucking vintage Les Paul off Joe’s half of the gift list and didn’t get Steven anything from his half. Asshole was banned from the house till Steven felt like forgiving him.

Laura replied with a photo of her topless, sent to both their phones, and after Joe nearly sliced off a finger seeing it, he made Steven answer his phone for the rest of the weekend. He did at least seem properly appreciative that her gift was going to be holding off the label and everyone else till it was a done deal, even though she was still supposed to be on vacation. Also, Steven had had no idea that Joe knew that many non-blood relation people, much less was willing to let them contact him. Made for a sizable addition to Steven’s own contact list.

And then Tom showed up at the cabin for lunch. It was their last day and Joe was walking around muttering about packing and the electricity and getting their stupid fucking driver, because he got real into nitpicking whenever he was leaving somewhere. Which went back to Elyssa, of course, and Joe was actually mumbling more than one sentence about it when Tom’s car pulled up the drive.

“Didn’t know you were that close,” Steven finally said, once Tom was out of the car and standing there and Joe was still on the porch and standing there, and the whole damn staring thing had gone past testosterone contest into unbearably awkward. They were in New Hampshire, not out West, and anyway, leaving him out of it for no reason. He hopped up onto the rail and then folded one leg up under himself. “I thought Terry said you were headed out of the country.”

“Out into the country,” Tom corrected. He came around the car and up the front steps, tucking his coat under one arm. “We went and bought a house.”

Steven twisted around to track him. “Around here?”

“No, more by Boston.” Tom looked around, trying to figure out how awkward he really was willing to make this, and then sighed and dropped his coat over the rail. “Okay. So I got your message.”

He glanced Steven’s way and Steven didn’t really think that much of it, but Joe snorted and put himself back against the wall. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah, once we get in town, we’ll look into rings and licenses and whatever.”

“Yeah, it seemed pretty sudden,” Tom said.

Joe raised his brows. “Shocked?”

“Are we doing it like this?” Tom and Steven both said.

Then Steven had to get off the rail, because Joe was hunching up his shoulders and shoving his face back under his hair, as if he wasn’t the one who’d positioned himself over there when they were over _here_ , and it was frustrating and stupid and Steven couldn’t shake the sense into Joe from the rail. But he’d only gotten about a step over when Tom threw up his hands, blocking his way.

“Joe, you’re a fucking piece of work,” Tom snapped. “I’m _happy_ for you.”

“Yeah, well, not like I can tell from here,” Joe snarled back. “Looks to me like you’re still fucking mad about shit that happened years ago.”

Tom reared back, ready to lay down, and then he just stepped back. He took a breath as if somebody was pulling his lungs on strings, then turned around and stared at his car. After a moment, he kicked his heel into the floorboards, looking down at that, jamming his hands into his pockets.

“I’d like to know one thing,” Steven said. He pushed his hands into his hips when they looked at him, because yeah, fine, he jumped into all sorts of shit head-first but that didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t fucking want to piss himself when he was checking out the jump. Then he yanked them off, because also, he _was_ the motherfucker who jumped first. “Just one fucking thing, okay, and then you can go back to this fucking vendetta. Is it me or is it Elyssa?”

“It’s—” Tom pulled out one hand and scratched at his nose, then kept his hand there to laugh into it. Then he put it down on his hip, sighing and shaking his head. “Look, it’s not even…you went with her.” To Joe. “I was mad as hell over it. But we got over it, and life went on. Then you came back, and you got with Steven.”

“You were giving me tips on that,” Joe said. He unfolded his arms enough to jab a finger at Tom. “The hell was that about, if you didn’t really want that to happen.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “I did want that to happen. You have this tunnel vision, Joe, and sometimes it’s the best thing about you and sometimes it’s just—the first fucking thing you asked me was whether Steven really was living with us. Jesus. You’re lucky we didn’t get so weirded out we threw you out the first night.”

“So why didn’t you?” Steven asked. He batted his hand at Joe, and when that just made the man redirect his glower to Steven’s knees, went over and braced his arm on Joe’s shoulder, also conveniently holding all that hair out of the way. He got a dirty look but Joe was still saving most of his heat for Tom. “Hey, I love how it turned out, all right? But I’m just curious.”

“Because you were in a big funk and we thought you might be going real, actual crazy, and if nothing else, having Joe as a roommate was going to give you a kick in the ass,” Tom told him, offering up a sour grin. “We figured it’d get you going _somewhere_.”

“Just not here,” Joe said.

The grin slid off Tom’s face. He looked at Joe for a while, and he was pissed off but that was just a cover for something else that Steven couldn’t quite figure out. That was what made Tom one to watch, because he didn’t just fucking hide—he was thinking under the hood there, all his cylinders running even when you couldn’t hear them.

“I’m happy for you,” Tom finally said, real quiet. “Both of you. That whole thing with Elyssa—look, we were younger, I thought different things were more important, I’ve got a little bit of a different perspective now. And right now, you know, it’s about the band, but the band is us, and I’ve already seen what happens when one of us stops…well, _working._ We really were worried about you, Steven.”

“I wasn’t threatening to slit my wrists or anything,” Steven said, blinking. “Not that I’m not touched, because I am. I really am.”

“Yeah, and I’ll be hearing about it for the rest of my life.” A faint smile danced around Tom’s mouth, maybe for two seconds. Then he sighed again, pushing the hair back from his face. “You weren’t suicidal, but you just weren’t…you. And it was a big deal getting that back, and it is down to Joe, and for just that I’d back you two against any army. But you never need anybody to back you up anyway.”

To Joe. Just to him, that last part, and Tom was still speaking soft and calm, but it came out like a slap anyway. Joe jerked up his head, his eyes narrowing. His shoulder was as stiff as iron under Steven’s arm.

“I’m not pretending that that’s a surprise,” Tom said. He shrugged. “I got in a band with you to get somewhere, because I always knew you were going to make it. You never gave a shit about anything else, and you were going to do it in spite of anybody else, and you were going to do it your way. But it takes a while to get used to.”

Joe loosened up his arms, letting them droop so they crossed at his belly. “I came back.”

“You still went out there with some other fucking band.” Not all of the anger had left Tom. “And you go out there with Steven now, and—and you do things that blow my mind, and I’d rather see that than not. But you’ve made it pretty obvious that you think I don’t have to be there for it to happen, and…well, fine, that’s life. But look, I have your back while you’re here, but I’m just not going to put myself out there to get burnt again.”

“I wasn’t trying to burn you—”

“I don’t get a fucking say? Jesus, Tom, thanks,” Steven said. He got off Joe and stepped away from the wall, pulling at his hair. “And after all we’ve been through.”

Tom blinked hard. Then he drew in a deep breath, the way you would if you were about to explain to your kid that mommy and daddy loved you very much, but they were going to screw you over anyway because that was their idea of having your best interests in mind.

“No, listen, asshole. Joe can think whatever he wants, but you’re in my fucking band too. And _I_ need you,” Steven snapped. “I don’t want to do auditions again. That was a pain in the ass and I’m done with switching up the line-up. I mean, maybe it’s because I’m getting on, but I want to settle the fuck down and just get to the music already. If he’s got a problem with that, then he’s got a problem but I’m going to ride you down and drag your ass back if I have to.”

“Well, maybe you two can fight that one out,” Tom said after a long pause.

“We’re not going to.” Joe glanced at Steven, not because he was worried about offending Steven—he just wanted to know if he’d have to make Steven shut up, and Steven was going to give him that one for now, just because of the rest of the situation. Then he looked back at Tom. “Look, Tom, I never said that. And I never…I thought you were too fucking mad at me to play with me again, you know? I still wanted to play, so I dropped in with some other guys over in England, but that was just…trying to keep busy. I came _back_ , all right? And Jesus, the most frustrating fucking thing about that was that I thought you’d be the hard one to deal with, but I started playing with you before Steven would even talk to me.”

Tom was definitely taking it in, but he wasn’t giving them much on how he was taking it in. He let Joe finish with an exasperated exhale, then just leaned against the rail and looked at them looking back at him. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t move. A couple crows flew by overhead, cawing, and Joe jerked off the wall and Steven rattled his foot against the porch, but Tom didn’t so much as twitch.

“So how was England?” he said, right when Joe had settled back down.

“What?” Then Joe straightened up and really looked at him. For a second Steven thought Joe was going to read it as time to get mad again, but then Joe shrugged one shoulder and waved his hand. “Oh…we cut some good stuff, had a great show. The other guys, they were all good, knew what they were doing. I learned a lot I don’t think I would’ve here. But then it just…it’s not like it was in the glory days with the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. It’s all club music and rap and Europop over there, hard to get rock going, and they just didn’t want to keep working at it the way we would’ve had to. I think we all knew it wasn’t going to last. It was…something to do, and I did it, and now I’m done with it.”

“Oh,” Tom said. And then lapsed back into his tall blond mute guy act.

Steven cleared his throat. “So…we’re getting married, and then we’re going to tell everybody. And then we’ll get working on the album.”

“Yeah, I cleared off my calendar,” Tom said. He rubbed at his mouth. “So where are you doing it?”

Steven opened his mouth, then looked at Joe, who raised his brows. So Steven raised his hands and looked towards the heavens for guidance, for truly, he was being tested. “Look, I proposed. You need to do some of the work here, Perry.”

“It’s been a fucking day, Steven. And most of that we spent, you know, talking to the band, or fu—”

“I can tell it’s going to be a blast, having you two be official,” Tom drawled. He grinned at them and Joe showed some teeth before he went back to being pissed off at Steven. “Well, I can tell you how Terry and I did it. Though knowing you—” to Steven “—you’re going to get way out there with the feathers.”

“I like feathers,” Steven said, wounded, hand to metaphorically bleeding breast. “What’s wrong with that?”

Joe snorted, but basically as a reflex. He was more interested in Tom. “Right. You know how to get the license, right? Well, if it’s the same way…”

“I’m pretty sure it’s the same office. I don’t know about what they’ll make you do, but anyway, I know that’s where you go,” Tom said.

“I guess we’ll start there.” Joe shrugged, then glanced down. He twisted at one of his bracelets and looked back up, at Steven. “I was thinking maybe we could just do that first. You want feathers, that’s going to take a while, and we should just get the paperwork done and then we can have whatever we want whenever we want.”

“Okay, but you’d better not be thinking you can put it off forever. I promised my mom.” Steven leaned in close to the other man. “And you aren’t going to be an asshole to my mom, right?”

Joe pushed him, then hooked his arm and pulled him back. Then wrapped that arm around Steven’s back, pinning Steven’s arms to his sides, jamming his chin down on the top of Steven’s head, so he could laugh down at Steven. He coughed at the elbow Steven stuck into his stomach, but held on for a couple more seconds. Then he loosened up his grip, enough for Steven to get his head up, and pressed his mouth to Steven’s ear. “ _Fine_. Feathers. And a priest. For your mom.”

“This is going to be interesting,” Tom said, in a tone that absolutely was not interested in the least. On the contrary, he sounded like he was one jump away from doing a Brad.

“Hey,” Joe said, and Tom started but he just about stayed put. “Hey, we’re going to need somebody else, right? Witnesses?”

Tom looked like he wanted to start again, but instead he just thought over Joe’s question. “Right. Two of them.”

“Well, is Terry with you?” Joe asked.

“I don’t think you have to get everything together right now,” Tom said after a moment.

Joe drew in a breath, slow enough so he could flick a look over at Steven during it. The corner of his mouth pulled up, then flattened out as he looked back at Tom. He stroked his fingers along Steven’s side. “No, but if she’s around, then why don’t we get it done?”

“Fine, but I get to pick the priest,” Steven said. “And the bridesmaids.”

Tom looked at Joe, then at Steven. Then back at Joe, and finally he seemed to get it, because he just laughed. “Oh, God. I dropped her off at a café in case it got nasty, but let me just call—Jesus, are we really doing this?”

“Yes,” Joe said. Leveling down, steady as a rock, and no one with a mind, right or wrong, was going to fight him on that one.

“Well, okay. Just give me a second,” Tom said, grinning. “Oh, my God. If this goes through, I’ll officially be unable to be surprised about anything involving us.”

* * *

Terry was surprisingly into it. The paperwork wasn’t that bad compared to licensing deals, but there was more of it than Steven would’ve expected and the clerk they had wasn’t too interested in helping them out—even though there was literally no one else in the damn place—till Terry started in on him. After that, it was a breeze. It really was a breeze, just blowing them along till suddenly they had a piece of paper and—that was it.

“Okay,” Steven said. He turned it over, then flipped it back and read through it again. Now it just seemed…very short, considering what it was. “Okay. So next, rings. And maybe dinner.”

“It’s not even noon,” Joe said.

Steven rolled his eyes. “I’m talking about how you never even bought me that dinner, Joe. It’s been a really lopsided relationship so far, considering you’re supposed to share and share alike in health and sickness and wealth and what’s the rest—”

Joe kissed him. Then stopped and pulled the license out of Steven’s hand and gave that to Tom, and then backed Steven up against the nearest vertical surface and went back to kissing him. Not—they weren’t trying to fuck in the clerk’s office, even if somebody in the background was starting to yell at them like they were. But kissing, just real slow, real deep, sinking into it, like rolling onto a good broken-in bed where it just curved up like a cradle around you. 

Wasn’t much to get thrown out for, by their standards. Even Terry was rolling her eyes over it. But they had to get on the road back to Boston anyway, so they let the morality police have its day. By then their driver had caught up with them, so they left Tom and Terry to Tom’s car and crawled into the back of their own, and okay, _then_ Joe wanted to fuck. They did pay the driver enough.

* * *

Joe took care of the rings once they got back to Boston. He’d gone out while Laura, mostly mollified about missing the paperwork once Steven told her she could handle getting the photographer for the real ceremony, was filling Steven in about how the label and their management was taking it. Then, when he’d come back, he’d let Steven get mad at him for not giving a shit before he finally shoved the box across the table.

He was at the stove when Steven came into the kitchen. Nothing fancy for dinner tonight, just bread and some cold cuts. “Do we have to go in now, or can it wait till everybody else comes back?” he asked. He zipped up the leftover pastrami and tossed aside the bag, then licked the peppery grease off his fingers. “It’s just another fucking week.”

“No idea,” Steven said.

Joe looked up, ready to be ticked off at Steven making such a big deal of it and then not being prepared and all that other shit that always came up, and then he saw Steven’s hand. He sucked in his breath a little. Then he put both hands down on the counter, leaning on them, and watched Steven look at his hand.

“I, um,” Steven said, and then cleared his throat. He felt off-balance, like the two halves of himself didn’t quite weigh the same, and he kept shifting his weight on his feet to try and even it out but it wasn’t working. “Fuck. It _is_ just another fucking week.”

After about a minute, Joe went back to making his sandwich. He put the cold cuts back in the fridge and then went and got his plate and sat down at the table. Steven followed him and took the seat on the left, thinking about saying something annoying just to get a fucking word out of Joe. Except once he got seated, he was just…still fucking off. He rocked back and forth, too annoyed at himself to care about what he was thinking about Joe, and looked around for something. Anything.

He saw a napkin and a pen. Steven got those over and started chewing on the pen-cap. It just fucking figured, he thought. Get one thing done, have another fucking thing pop up in its place, like whack-a-mole with a broken hammer. He didn’t really want to talk about the label or management, or about what they were going to do now. They just were, and they should be allowed to be that, and he had two lines down on the napkin almost before he realized.

Three more lines in, he looked up and realized he’d been writing to Joe’s riffing for a while. About a quarter of Joe’s sandwich was gone, but Joe didn’t seem inclined to do anything with the rest now that he had his guitar. Steven hated to let things go to waste, so he pulled over the plate and began picking off pieces while he mumbled and scatted and hummed to himself, working his way down one side of the napkin and onto the other.

When he ran out of napkin, he got up to get something else, a notepad he’d left behind the knife-box during some other aborted writing session, and when he got back to the table, Joe had turned the chairs so he could put his feet up on Steven’s. He grunted when Steven squeezed into his, but didn’t miss a note. Steven took a second to get used to Joe’s elbow sliding across his ribs, then began writing again. He felt better about these lines and eventually he realized it was because he didn’t feel like he was tilting over anymore.

Just another day. That was all they were doing, he thought, and the next time he got stuck and raised his hand to his mouth, going to chew a knuckle, the ring slipped between his lips. That was different. And then he had an idea about the next rhyme and he forgot about the difference and just went with it. Half an ear on Joe, half an arm on him too, like usual.

* * *

By the time Joey showed up, Steven and Joe had worked out basic tracks for six or seven songs, and Steven had pretty complete ideas for two or three singles. Tom and Brad were due the next day, and then they were supposed to have a meeting with management and the label to let everybody know how the album was going to go and what producers they wanted and when they’d need studio time.

“And when we’re just going to fucking talk about it already?” Joey said. “You know, the whole marriage thing?”

Joe snorted from where he was kicked back on the couch, with his feet up on one arm and his head on the other, and the guitar banging into Steven’s head from behind. “It’s not like we tape over the rings when we go out.”

“You haven’t really _been_ out,” Laura said from where she was curled up in the armchair. Maybe a beat later than normal—she’d been looking very pleased with herself the last day or so, and not just about Steven and Joe, and Steven was more than halfway to believing she’d gotten a steady hook-up herself that she was hiding. “I’m getting a zillion messages wondering why you’re suddenly skipping all the parties.”

“Well, tell them we’re on our honeymoon in Bermuda.” Steven leaned back against the couch, then ducked his head under the guitar and flopped on his belly on the floor, going parallel with Joe. That finally got rid of the glare on Laura’s iPad and no, that definitely had not been the glare. “Or in this magical Tokyo cathouse that apparently makes you flexible enough to literally fuck yourself.”

Joe stopped playing and leaned over Steven’s shoulder. “ _What_ is that?”

“Doujinshi,” Steven said, while Laura tried to hide behind her phone. “You know, acrobatics and weird proportions and totally screwing up the eyes aside, there’s some good ideas in here.”

“Look, my girlfriend’s over in an hour and then you can go do your thing, okay?” Joey muttered, sinking down in his chair. He looked like he badly wanted to crank up the TV, except Steven had the remote because if they were going to watch this stupid show and make him sit with them, he was going to make damn sure they switched it off the moment it was done. “But it’s just—I mean, doesn’t it get to you? Just sitting around and waiting for somebody to find out?”

Joe made this little, sort of clicking, sort of wet noise, not really believing but not really disgusted disbelieving either. He leaned over far enough to have to put one hand on Steven’s back for balance. “Is that supposed to be _us_?”

“Wait till you see how they drew Brad,” Steven said, and yelped when Joe blew what sounded and felt like a hysterical raspberry into his hair. He rolled over to hit the other man, but Joe grabbed his arm just above the elbow and hauled him up onto the couch. 

There was a fight between the iPad and the guitar, which ended with the guitar retreating to the floor and the iPad, still in Steven’s hand, floating a couple inches from Joe’s nose. Joe shoved Steven’s head into the cushions and twisted around so he had his free arm lying across Steven’s side, keeping Steven down, like his own personal iPad stand. He tugged at Steven’s wrist to make the iPad straight for himself.

“Your tongue looks like a tentacle,” Joe observed. “I don’t think that’s sexy.”

“So we’re not talking about this?” Joey sighed.

Joe let go of Steven’s arm and slouched back so Steven could get himself turned around. The first thing that greeted Steven were the end credits of that stupid, stupid show the other guys were inexplicably obsessed with, and Joey’s serious, incredibly pained because he hated having to be the serious one, face.

“Well, I don’t consider that we’re hiding,” Joe said after a moment. “If somebody asks, I’m just going to answer. I don’t see why we need to send out a press release.”

Laura put her hand to the side of her face, then laid it down on the chair arm and pushed herself straight. “No, you don’t need to, but it’s…like drawing a line in the sand. If you don’t, people are going to push and push just because they don’t know where things are. You put a line down, then everyone can at least go oh, okay, that’s that.”

“Except they don’t, and that’s the one reservation I’ve got,” Steven said. “I mean, at first I was thinking it’d just be good to get it over with, but we’ve got to get the album done and trying to write songs is fucking messy for us anyway, and…I just don’t want to get into another big blow-up because now everybody’s just interested in these.”

He held up his hand, thumb on the ring, and then tipped himself up into a cross-legged sit on the edge of the couch. The iPad beeped at him and he glanced down, then slid it onto the coffee table, where Laura snagged it, blushed, and then turned off her alarm for Mr. Ten O’Clock Cocktail.

“Okay, but it takes us forever to put an album together,” Joey said. “And we blow up at each other anyway, and Jesus Christ, it’s us, they’re always going to find something besides the music to bitch about because nobody up there wants to admit we’re any good. So—”

“So why are you so eager? It’s not you,” Joe said.

Joey’s eye flinched. He pressed his lips together and rocked in his seat a couple times. “No, okay, but I just don’t like pretending shit isn’t there. And that’s what it’s like for me. I’m not you, fine, okay, but…that’s what it’s like where I’m at.”

He was obviously thinking Joe was going to haul him over the fire for that one, but Joe just sat back and fiddled with his hair and acted like he wasn’t thinking about getting back his guitar. When Steven reached down and got it for him, he looked relieved to the point that his lashes actually fluttered. He didn’t even look like that when he figured out that no, Steven had not caught the last bus out of town and ditched him, and okay, maybe that was why Steven dropped his shoulder pretty hard into Joe, leaning back.

“Well, I think we were going to talk about it when everybody got together,” Steven said, ignoring the guitar neck bashing his arm. “I don’t want this to end up like that damn _Rolling Stone_ cover.”

“You can’t just climb into Joe’s lap at a press conference either,” Laura said. She rolled her eyes at Steven’s mock-faint of surprise. “Look, as much as that would personally delight _me_ , that’s going to do exactly what you want to avoid and make it all about the trashy side of this.”

“Why don’t you just do that cover?” Joey asked. “Hey, I told you, I was okay with it before. So…you know, they’re going to ask about all the shit you do during shows anyway, right? So just answer the question.”

Joe looked up from his strings, blinking. Then he stretched his head back over the top of the couch, a grin slowly curling across his mouth. He stopped jabbing his tuning pegs into Steven’s arm. “Not a bad idea.”

“We’ll take it to the other guys, see what they think,” Steven finally said, and smacked the back of his hand into the guitar when he thought he saw Joe sneering at him. “Hey, man, they’re in this marriage too.”

“Yeah.” Joe pulled his head back and he wasn’t sneering. Just had had a twist of hair in the way, cutting up the shape of his smile, but it was out of the way now. And he was still smiling, amazingly. And not sarcastic or amused or anything negative like that, but just…smiling. “Okay. We’ll talk about it.”

“Okay, so I’ll give the _Stone_ editor a call while you guys are in your meetings,” Laura said. “We’ll take it from there.”

* * *

They did the interview and the cover, which came out later that month when they were all deep into the album. The requests for follow-up press drove Steven more crazy than the sudden masses of fans outside the house, six deep, twenty-four-seven, too thick for even the paparazzi to get long-distance shots, and after two days of arguing, they got the label to move them out to a studio with better security. Also, the band voted to ban Steven from answering the phone till the album was in the can, with the only exceptions being unless it was family or somebody on Laura’s cleared list. Joe was supposed to handle phone duties instead.

Steven had never finished lyrics so fast in his life. And to give credit where credit was due, he didn’t think the band had ever played better either than when they were putting together those songs. It took a week to adjust, but soon they were down there, sweating it out, shoveling aside the shit till they struck gold, the outside world completely forgotten. They really put their blood and bitching and breath into the album, and when they finally emerged to play it all the way through, he just sat on the couch in the back of the studio and cried. It just sounded so damn _good_.

The reception was a week later. They had twenty-seven gate-crashers, three of whom got to stay because their outfits just looked too good to leave out of the photos, one public condemnation for corrupting the youth from some fundamentalist cable nut, and instead of mobbing the car outside, their fans orchestrated an honor guard that simultaneously sabered off bottles of bubbly from both sides of the street. Laura cried when she saw the cracks in the car windows from the corks. Then she found out that the bubbly was non-alcoholic and Joey and Brad had to carry her inside because she couldn’t stop laughing.

Steven got a fifteen-foot peacock tail. He was having fun knocking people off their feet with it up till he saw the little patch of green and blue and gold sticking out of Joe’s lapel. The motherfucker had gotten himself a peacock-feather corsage and he looked so fucking smug about it, and it served him right when Steven broke down and bawled into his shoulder.

They had let Steven pick the priest—actually, his mom, and she knew what she was doing. The guy started in on the vows like a drill sergeant, prodding Joe to stop swearing at Steven long enough to give his answers, and paced himself so perfectly that when Joe, finally giving up on trying to talk Steven out of crying, pried Steven’s head up and just shut Steven’s mouth with his own, he was right there to give completely unnecessary permission to them to do that.

Two days later they were on tour again. The peacock tail came out at every show, and went back in the wardrobe short a couple more inches of feathers every night, because in between the fans wanting souvenirs and Joe’s fondness for trashing Steven’s stage outfits, it was never going to be a keeper. But that was fine. They had an album that was storming the charts, the best band out there, and were legally, musically, soulfully allowed to fuck around with each other. They were pretty much set for life.

_TYLER: Somebody still owes me dinner.  
PERRY: It’s good to have something to look forward to. And you know, even with everything that’s happened and all the messes we’ve been through, I still look forward to doing it all again. I guess that’s how you know it’s meant to be._


End file.
